Replacing Optical Drive with SSD - Late 2009 iMac

[neil950]

Just finished replacing my optical drive in my late 2009 21.5" iMac with a new SSD, using the optical drive / SSD adapter case and the ifixit guide.

Physical installation went fine but when mac switched on it does not recognise the SSD (in finder or disk utility) - tried restarting numerous times but no joy. The SSD has a clone of my iMac hard drive on it so I can use it as a bootable disk.

If I connect the SSD to an external USB port it works fine - the iMac sees it.

I also disconnected the SATA connectors from my internal HDD and slaved the SSD in its place - this time the SSD works fine and the mac boots up from it.

So for some reason when connected to the optical SATA connector the iMac doesn't see it but it works fine when connected to the internal HDD SATA connector or external USB.

Can anyone offer any advice as to why this is so? Lots of other people appear to be replacing the optical drive with a SSD without any problems.

Thanks

 

[toddzrx]

Did you try putting the optical drive back in to see if it still works? Maybe the SATA connector to the optical bay is broken?

 

[neil950]

Yes - put optical drive back in and works fine

 

[thedeske]

Just to cover a basic - Repair permissions from the recovery partition - both disks (if it can see both) & Option key boot from there once it's done?

Good mystery, considering the SSD boots from the main slot and the DVD drive still works in the other.