So, I got a spare SSD drive laying around

[slitherjef]

With my windows machines when ever I did an upgrade to my machine, I usually wiped the drive or just installed a new HDD and re-installed windows on the new drive. This was back in the day before recovery partitions where made on prebuilt machines, you know, when they came with a physical disc, albeit a recovery disk. When I built my windows boxes, I just bought the OS to go with it. Now if you change too much hardware you need to call microsoft.

Anyway, I know a recovery partition is on my 13" MBP. If I pull the drive out, well I can't access the partition. So, that leaves me to question:

If I chose to install this 128gb crucial SSD drive into my MBP, will I need to buy lion on a thumb drive? 70 bucks is not bad, Microsoft wants 200 bucks for home premium full

Or is there a plan B that I can use? I suppose either way I am looking to spend some money to swap out my drives. The good thing is, I don't have hardly anything saved to my MBP.

I DO have an external HDD dock and can come up with a spare 2tb drive (its pretty much empty) I can use to move stuff around. I don't have a time machine, but I suppose I can back up to the external HDD.

I don't have much of a problem buying lion on a thumb drive. Though I do wonder if this will cause an issue when mountain lion is released, I am sure I would have to pay for an upgrade anyway.

 

[Crazy Badger]

I'm sure if you look hard enough on the Internet you'll find a downloadable version of Lion you can burn to a DVD and install from there?

Don't see how this can be considered piracy if you already have a Lion license.

 

[slitherjef]

I'm sure if you look hard enough on the Internet you'll find a downloadable version of Lion you can burn to a DVD and install from there?

Don't see how this can be considered piracy if you already have a Lion license.

Yeah, I am sure I can also find a whole bunch of other included features along with it. No thanks, I will buy the thumb drive.

 

[safelder]

I know that I created my own USB drive (bootable, I think) of Lion using a utility that I downloaded from Apple. That would be one solution. Another would be to download Carbon Copy Cloner and clone the recovery partition to the new drive, then do the swap and complete the install.

 

[ldominguez1986]

Can't you just clone the drive that already has Lion onto the ssd drive? That's what I did when I bought a new hdd for my mac mini. It will save you from having to spend money and you can keep everything the same from before.
here is a video to help you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztYcW-u_Kkg

 

[ryannel2003]

Depending on the MacBook Pro I thought he could use the Command-T command on startup that accesses the partition that could allow him to download Lion on to the drive? That partition is built into the firmware. I believe it is for the Mid-2010 MacBook Pro's and above.

 

[slitherjef]

I got a bit before I do the drive surgery as since I figured if I want to upgrade my ram, I might as well do that too while I am inside the case.

Guess I should browse the SSD sticky and watch some youtube vids while I am waiting

 

[slitherjef]

Okay, I think I got things figured out. I will need to get a thumbdrive, but office depot has them on sale for about 16 bucks for 8gig and I found a video on youtube that really helped and pointed me here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433

Guess I need to download that onto my thumbdrive and then do the HDD upgrade.