Chosen Solution
I have a MacBook Pro 15" late 2011. I am trying to upgrade the HDD to a SSD. What I’ve done: Cloned original HDD using CCC and the SSD was attached via a USB adapter. Prior to using CCC I formatted the SSD to Mac OS Extended Journaled and set the partition to “1”. After CCC completed I changed the boot drive to the SSD while the HDD was still installed internally via the startup disk utility. Everything functioned properly when booting from the SSD through USB. I swapped the HDD (internal) for the SSD; Started the MacBook and all I receive is the flashing folder with the question mark. The firmware on the SSD is up to date and I have also made sure my Boot ROM Version and SMC Version are the most up to date via the apple website. The SSD is a Crucial M500 series. Software: OS X 10.9 (13A603) Hardware: Model Name: MacBook Pro Model Identifier: MacBokPro8,2 Processor Name: Intel Core i7 Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz Number of Processors: 1 Total Number of Cores: 4 L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB L3 Cache: 6MB Memory: 16 GB Boot ROM Version: MBp81.0047.B27 SMC Version (system): 1.69f4
What happens when you connect your HD via the USB connection are you able to get it to boot up via the HD? If you are can you see the SSD and the files on it? Update At this point I think you’ll need to redo your SSD after you have it installed working off of a CD/DVD (Apple logo’ed OS disks or recovery disk - any version will do here) or a USB thumb drive which is able to install the OS. As you can’t use your system’s copy of OS-X to prep the thumb drive you’ll need to find a friend who has a Mac that can help you here. Once you get the thumb drive working as a bootable drive test it out on your system if it works copy over the Lion or Mountain Lion or Mavericks installer. Redo so your SSD drive that is internally in your system so its working (Redoing everything). As to your current HD files that you want to transfer back over: You’ll need to use an external HD to make a backup (TimeMachine). Hopefully the transfer to a drive that is already formatted will allow them to be copied back to your SSD. You could try out your friends Mac to see if it can see the HD via the Universal cable connection. If you can, you might be able to connect via WiFi or a wired network (FireWire or Ethernet) the two systems and copy things across.
Try a different cloning software. I’ve had this issue before.
