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I've purchased an SSD drive INTEL SSDSA2CW120G3 and had a guy in Apple Reseller store clone the original HDD to the SSD.

The problem is, that the original HDD was almost dead and there were some problems while cloning. They also cloned some kind of hidden/encrypted partition, which is required for Lion.

They told me that I should use my Snow Leopard install DVD to format the main data partition and then reinstall Snow Leopard and upgrade to Lion from App Store.

They also said something about having problems with cloning the hidden partition.

Is there any safe way that I can check, if I'm going to be able to install Snow Leopard and then safely upgrade to Lion after I format the SSD? Or even better, is there any way to install Lion directly?

edit: looking at the restore partition, it looks like it's empty

enter image description here

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The Recovery HD partition is not meant to be clone-able. They clearly failed and had no idea what they were doing when it came to that stage.

Running the Lion installer will install that Recovery HD partition properly. Please note that the Recovery HD partition is not required for Lion, but can be useful if you have any boot errors and need to reinstall Lion at a later date.

Re-installing Snow Leopard from a Lion install will not work, the user account details are slightly different between Snow Leopard and Lion (found that out the hard way), this would essentially render your user account useless.

Good Luck!

P.S. I'd advise you don't go back to that reseller, they have no clue what they're doing.

P.P.S. iampearce's comment about the drive being physically in the machine before installing Lion is irrelevant, and incorrect. The files that are used during the installer are loaded according to the machine hardware you boot from.

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  • Thanks you are completely right. What I actually did is bought USB to SATA, booted to my original HDD, created a rescue partition on a USB stick (which probably wasn't necessary), then created one big partition as you suggested, installed Snow Leopard, upgraded to Lion and it works great! The USB stick didn't really help when the disk was still paritioned, but as soon as I created only one big partition it worked just fine.
    – Jakub Arnold
    Jan 15, 2012 at 11:48
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Use this - it runs you through how to use it. You just need to download the app from the app store and follow the instructions.

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  • Forgot to say - before you start installing lion, swap out the drives - the lion installer will be more than happy with the SSD once it's in the machine. this is exactly what I've done with my 2010 MBP and it worked an absolute dream.
    – George Pearce
    Jan 9, 2012 at 12:25
  • Am I supposed to swap them during the installation? How's that even possible?
    – Jakub Arnold
    Jan 9, 2012 at 12:28
  • Not during - Install Lion to the pen drive, shut down, swap out, boot to the pen drive.
    – George Pearce
    Jan 9, 2012 at 12:29
  • I used these instructions aswell :)
    – gentmatt
    Jan 9, 2012 at 13:07

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