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woodbine

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 8, 2010
200
18
Bath, UK
I would like to move my SSD from laptop to tower. Laptop is on Lion, tower on SL.
So is there a recommended way to erase the SSD ready for the tower.
It's an OWC 240GB drive, fully firmwared.
 
something very strange is happening...

I put in the installer disc, to erase the drive. Doesn't appear anywhere, Disc Utility, Start Up disc or as a disc to install SL on.
I made a clone and started up from the clone, doesn't appear anywhere there.
But the system will start on the SSD and operate normal.
The only way to see it is via Target mode.
WTF!!
 
Install the SSD in position 2 in your Mac Pro, boot from normal drive, go to Disk utility and the SSD should appear there. Select it, erase and zero if you wish, format Mac OS Extended and into Partition and set up as GUID.

Then install Lion onto the SSD assuming you copied it to a thumb drive prior to laptop install. if not, install Snow Leopard on the SSD as a clean install, not cloned, update to OS X.6.8 and go to App Store, hold down Option and hit Purchases and download Lion again. there is no additional charge.
 
Install the SSD in position 2 in your Mac Pro, boot from normal drive, go to Disk utility and the SSD should appear there. Select it, erase and zero if you wish, format Mac OS Extended and into Partition and set up as GUID.

That won't actually wipe the data out on the SSD though (even with zeroing, it will still be full of zeros and those will need to be moved before new data can be written).

I've had good success booting in to Ubuntu and following these steps on my MP with the same SSD. This basically marks the drive as "empty", and every cell as empty in just a few seconds -- https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

Unfortunately the website isn't working currently, but the contents of the page are here:- http://groups.google.com/group/lvl1/msg/c854bd09040c9b1e?pli=1
 
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