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MacBook Pro 15" Early 2011 I’ve upgraded my Optical drive for a Samsung SSD 840EVO with the intention of this being my startup disk - I followed this tutorial to do so: Installing MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Early 2011 Dual Hard Drive I initially wiped the pre-existing 500GB SATA disk before installation, when I boot my laptop in recovery and go Disk Utility I couldn’t re-install Mountain Lion or Mavericks on the new SSD, I tried creating a partition and the error that kept coming up was: Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed I’ve read elsewhere on this forum and on the net, seemingly my SSD is compatible with my laptop at SATA 6Gb/s but even if it couldn’t read 6Gb/s it’s also compatible with 3Gb/s. It can see the drive so it couldn’t be the cable connecting the drive could it? Any help would be greatly appreciated! I’m a total novice at doing anything like this.
Ho No! Your between a rock and a hard place here ;-{ You need to have a bootable disk HD or SSD (ThunderBolt, FireWire, or USB) with the Mountain Lion installer to install your OS onto your new SSD. If you hadn’t deleted your current HD you could have used it to install a fresh copy of OS to your SSD internally. Did you create a recovery disk (CD/DVD) or USB thumb drive? If you do you could also use it. OK you don’t have any bootable disk nor a recovery disk. Now what? In that case you’ll need to visit the nearest Apple Store, but before you do take the SSD out and put back your optical drive so its back as it was first. Once they fix you up. get a USB thumb drive and make it bootable. Once you are sure you have it working (go into the Startup control panel to set it as the boot disk and test it out) Then copy over the Mountain Lion Installer app and then do your thing! Good Luck!
