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I just installed the SSD and I cannot detect the SSD in Disk Utilities of the recovery disk. Even trying to restore from time machine backup it cannot find any disk it can restore to. I am restoring Mac OS X Lion backup and using the Lion bootable USB stick.

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  1. Boot into Recovery from the USB.
  2. Instead of opening Disk Utility, open Terminal instead.
  3. Run the command diskutil list to see that your drive is being recognised. It should list two disks, one being your bootable drive, the other your SSD, and provide you with a disk identifier (such as disk0). If it doesn't show up, check that you have installed it properly.
  4. If it is showing up, then type diskutil partitionDisk disk0 GPT JHFS+ MacHD to correctly set the partition map to GPT and create a HFS+ Journaled volume. Change disk0 to the appropriate identifier for your SSD. You can rename the 'MacHD' volume later in Disk Utility or Finder, if you wish.
  5. Quit Terminal.

You should now be able to pick up the disk in Disk Utility and Time Machine to restore your backup.

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  • So turned out that in the morning I checked the internal cable using my iPhone camera and found out that the SSD needed to be raised a bit in order for it to be correctly mounted in the slot. Installing it correctly made it show up. But this is good to know for someone who wants to format using command line.
    – Encore PTL
    Commented Dec 13, 2014 at 14:48

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