Chosen Solution
Hi all, I recently replaced my HDD with a Crucial MX300 SSD into my iMac Mid 2011 2.5 GHz, running OS 10.8.5. I successfully formatted the drive and cloned my data over using Carbon Copy Cloner, checked it was bootable before installing, and installed the SSD, carefully following the OWC video on how to do this. Initially, it booted fine, and I have been working on it for the past couple of days. However, today, something frightening happened! The iMac wouldn’t recognise the SSD at all on start up. It first booted in internet recovery mode, but the disk would not show up in Disk Utility or Startup Disk. I then restarted it, and was met with a circle symbol with a line through it, either on its own, or shortly following the Apple logo. There was also a flashing symbol of a folder with a question mark on it. Since this problem occurred, it has successfully booted up once. But after that, I continue to get these errors each time I boot up. Now, every time I boot up, it just shows the folder/question mark symbol. I am very concerned about this, mainly because I don’t know why it’s happening. I did everything correctly, and wasn’t having any problems at all, until now. Is there anything I can try to get around this, or potential issues that might be making this happen? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, James Update (03/25/2017) Update: It turns out that it was the 2.5 to 3.5 enclosure that was faulty. The guys at the shop just taped the SSD in instead in and did without the enclosure. Working fine so far, and I’m currently typing this on it now! Thankfully it was nothing I did. Needless to say the enclosure is going straight back to Crucial, and I’m going to endeavour to get some money for the repair job too. Thanks for all your help. James
First CCC is not very good any more. I used it for quite a few years and was quite happy with it! Sadly it doesn’t handle things the way you need with the newer versions of OS-X & MacOS. As an example, it won’t prep the new drive with the hidden recovery partition it also messes up some application keys if you also don’t use the newest version you can encounter other issues as well. Apples OS installer and Migration Assistant apps are much better as it will create the hidden partition and carry over the keys. I would start off backing up your data if you don’t already haver a backup and then create a bootable installer USB thumb drive so you can scratch the drive down and re-install. But before you go to all this work how about telling us what your system is and which SSD you put in as that also has a bearing here as well as the version of OS-X/MacOS you are using.
