Assuming that your boot drive is the only other drive, and that you have not used File Vault or BootCamp, then power up the machine, and when you hear the chime (and *only* when you hear the chime) press and hold Option. Wait a good twenty seconds, just to be absolutely damned sure. Then press left arrow one time, and Enter. Wait, a good minute and possibly more. Then press VO+F5. Turn up your speaker volume (the attached ones) nice and loud so you can actually hear the bloody thing.
Now use Disk Utility from the Utilities menu or table to partition your internal drive. Select the physical disk from the table; not the partition. It will be named something like “Apple SSD” or “Something something HD Media” or something of that nature; choose that, and then the Partition tab. Create one partition of type “Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)”. Give it a name by typing something meaningful into the box (“Macintosh HD” is what it shipped with but I always like “Macintosh SSD” on my SSDs). Press Options, and choose GUID Partition Table (it should already be set) and then OK to close that dialog box. Press Apply, and reply to the alert by pressing Partition. Quit Disk Utility, and proceed with the installation to your internal volume, which will have the name that you gave it. Optional, but recommended: after partitioning the disk but before installing, shut the machine down from the Apple menu and wait a bit. Disconnect all physical peripherals and cables, including power. Wait 20 seconds then reconnect only the power. On a portable, press Control+Option+Shift+Power to reset the SMC. Reconnect your USB drive, and then press power; when you hear the chime, and again, *only* when you hear the chime, press Command+Option+P+R and wait for the machine to chime at least two times; this resets your parameter RAM. Now let up on the keyboard and allow your box to boot up again from the USB drive. Once again press Command+F5, and this time directly install onto your internal disk. You may of course also reconnect your other peripherals now. Important: only Apple-supplied SSDs get TRIM by default and other drives must have it manually enabled (yay Apple, keep it up, you’ll see the light yet). Unless you modded your Mac you have nothing to fear—and if you modded your Mac, you probably don’t need these instructions. But for those that did, remember to invoke the trimforce tool at least once your system is installed to switch TRIM on. That’s everything … -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
