Swapping a hard drive to an SSD question

[longgonesam]

I’m going to swap the original HDD from my MBP early 08 to an SSD from OWC. as opposed to creating the USB bootable installer, is there any reason why i couldn’t format and clone the SSD from the HDD? i have a dual dock external HD dock that clones. i’m thinking that i could remove the HDD and clone the SSD before installation? seems doable but not sure. advantages or not from USB installer method? currently running Yosemite

 

[GGJstudios]

Here's an effective approach:

1. Buy an external enclosure and put your old drive in it.
2. Install your new drive in your Mac.
3. Boot from your old (external) drive by holding the Option key on startup.
4. Prepare your new drive by formatting it to HFS+ using Disk Utility
5. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old (external) drive to the new (internal) drive.
6. Boot from the new internal drive.
7. Your now running on your new internal drive and your old drive is now an external drive, useful for backups or additional storage.

Some have encountered problems cloning from the internal to the external, then swapping them, which is why I recommend you swap them first, then clone from the external to the new internal. For more info on this: Can't Boot From Cloned External SSD

 

[longgonesam]

Bingo! makes perfect sense. thanks mucho

 

[grockk]

If you only do a format and clone you may not have the recovery partition which is required for FileVault and Find my Mac among other things.

 

[Apple_Robert]

If you only do a format and clone you may not have the recovery partition which is required for FileVault and Find my Mac among other things.

Good point.

If one uses a CCC cloned backup, it isn't an issue, as CCC clones the recovery partition during the cloning process.