2008 C2D MacBook doesn't recognize blank SSD

[gijs-apple]

Hi everyone,

I bought an old Macbook (white 2,4GHz C2D 2008) for $25 on eBay and had the plan to upgrade the RAM and hard disk. The RAM is no problem, but the machine doesn't recognize the SSD I bought for the upgrade.

It's a blank Intenso 2,5" Sata 3 SSD with 256GB of storage and a read speed of 520 Mb/s: https://www.intenso.de/en/products/solid-state-drives/2,5" SSD Top Performance

I thought I could just pop in the SSD and use OS X Lion Internet Recovery to format the SSD and reinstall the OS, but I keep getting the 'no hard drive found' error. Pressing Command + R upon start up doesn't yield any results.

Any thoughts on what I can do to get it to work? Maybe the SSD is too new/fast? Thanks a bunch!

 

[glenthompson]

When you install macOS it creates the recovery partition on the drive. A new 3rd party drive has no such recovery partition. That MacBook may be too old to support internet recovery. What most people do is boot from the original drive and install the os on the SSD installed in an external usb caddy. Lets you test it before going through the install. Or put your old drive in a caddy and boot from it and then install macOS. The SATA interface in that machine is fairly slow for a SSD but much faster then a spinning drive.

 

[gijs-apple]

Thanks - I totally forgot to check if my MacBook supports Internet Recovery. It seems it's too old because support for this was only added in 2012, so I'll go out and try the steps you're describing.