Mac – Planning on a SSD, bought Mountain Lion. How to do

macbook proosx-mountain-lionssd

I own a MBP 13" mid 2009 running Snow Leopard. Now, I just bought Mountain Lion and haven't installed it yet. I am planning to get a new SSD to replace my optical drive.

Here's the process that I think is the most practical:

  1. Installing Mountain Lion on my HDD
  2. When the SSD arrives, I'll replace it with the HDD
  3. Now what? (something with the disk utility)
  4. Install Mountain Lion on the SSD
  5. Replace the optical drive with the HDD
  6. Backup all the HDD stuff except "System" folder – Is that right? How should I back up it?
  7. Reformat the drive
  8. Copy the data I backed-up back to the HDD
  9. Move "Applications" app to the SSD – Again, is that right? What about the "Application Support" folder?

Now to questions:

  1. See above: Number 6 question
  2. I read that I need to run disk utility before installing the DVD on the new SSD, how and why?
  3. Is it legal to install it on my current HDD, then install it on the SSD and remove it from the HDD?
  4. How can I move all my Apps to the new SSD?
  5. Do I need to move Library to the SSD also? If not, how will I configure that all the apps need to use the Library folder from the HDD?
  6. Will I have to re-install applications?

Best Answer

You can create a Mountain Lion DVD image for an installation from scratch as described here. That way you can install the new disk and don't need to worry about not having e.g. the rescue partition for installation after installing the SSD.

You can use the same image and write it to a USB thumb drive to boot from.

You can replace the HDD with the SSD (keep the optical drive) and treat it as a regular disk upgrade installation. You have several options to transfer your data from one system to the other, and they're presented during OS X Mountain Lion setup:

  • by creating a disk image of the old system and then restoring it to the new disk when booting from DVD.
  • by having a Time Machine backup und restoring that to the new disk (be careful, you should probably install the OS from scratch first so you get the recovery partition)
  • by getting a 2.5" USB enclosure for the old HDD, and connecting it that during or after (Migration Assistant) installation.

Afterwards, remove the optical drive, and install the HDD again. Use it for data.

Alternatively, remove the optical drive and install the SSD.

  • You can copy the old HDD volumes to the SSD in the installer (boot from HDD recovery partition or thumb drive). Then, boot from SSD into your OS and format the HDD.
  • You can boot into recovery and install OS X onto the DVD, with the option of restoring a Time Machine backup to it.

All of these can be performed before and after installation of Mountain Lion. As always, keep good backups, especially when playing with disks and disk management utilities.

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