New SSD not detected

"A new internal drive normally ships unformatted. Unless the operating system on the old boot drive posts a dialog box offering to format the unrecognized drive, the computer doesn't ""detect"" anything because there isn't anything the operating system can speak to yet.

Of course, if the way you installed this SSD was to remove the previous internal HD and install the SSD in its place, without formatting the new SSD and installing a bootable operating system first, then there's no operating system or formatting utility at all.

What steps have you already taken? If you can give us a detailed list of the things you've already done, in order, it will be easier to determine where the problem is.

A common technique to replace an internal boot HD with an SSD would be to:

attach the SSD as an external drive first through USB/FireWire/ Thunderboltuse Disk Utility to format the SSDclone the operating system+user data from the internal HD to the external SSD using Disk Utility, SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner (you can also do a clean operating system install by downloading an installer from the App Store and installing it on the new drive)then open up the computer and swap the drives

That way, once you restart the reassembled computer, you can at least be sure that there's a drive with a bootable operating system available. If you're following the technique I've outlined, it's wise to try booting from the new external SSD before installing it internally, just to make sure the computer recognizes the drive as bootable."

"To answer the question “laptop does not detect the drive” as follows:

Also bought a Crucial 525 SSD drive and yes my mac did not recognize the drive in Finder nor in disc utilities.

I studied the advise and did not get a good answer why the drive is not detected.

Not being scared of computers by now, I again tried to format the drive in disk utilities and saw the view button in the left hand top corner and when opened it revealed “show only volumes” which is the standard configuration and “show all devices” which I then selected and problem solved.

The disk was detected and I could format it.

Hope the info will help.

Gurupvd"

"I just installed a Samsung 860 EVO in my mid-2009 MacBook Pro, as a replacement to the HD that crashed.

Initially, I thought that the unformatted drive would show up as an option for OS X install and that the install process would take care of it, so I directly replaced the internal HD with the SSD. The SSD did not show as an option for installation.

Searched for a solution and found this thread, I did not need to remove the SSD and format it while connected as an external drive; from the install screen I selected Disk Utilities, formatted the drive, quit disk utilities and proceed with the install screen and the drive showed as an option.

Thanks for the help."

I have a similar problem trying to install a Samsung EVO 850 SSD in my Macbook Pro early 2011. The guys at the apple store told me to install the new drive, hold down cmd R to go into recovery mode, then install a new OS on the drive. However when I got to that point it didnt't recognize the SSD. So I used disk utility to erase the SSD, then it recognized the drive & it let me download Mountain Lion from the internet which seemed to go well. Then I tried to restore from Time Machine which also went well. However, when it was done it wouldn't recognize my password. I tried restarting & now it get the Apple symbol & the spinning wheel. I also have an iMac. Should I try formatting the SSD as an external drive as described above? Thanks for your help!