I've been promising myself for years, that I would buy my LAST hard drive that year. I've been yearning to get an SSD drive, which for the unenlightened non-tech savvy readers, is a technology that works lightening fast as a storage device, rather than slow and sluggish as normal hard drives do.
Finally a couple of weeks ago I caved in, and bought a Crucial 256GB drive at B&H in New York. I complacently tossed the box it came in, when I was unwrapping on my way to the subway. I thought: Of course it's gonna work.
Then sadly, as soon as I had installed it into my MacBook Pro, and powered up it came up with all sorts of errors. "Oh, no. More bug-hunting."
But luckily I found the solution:
Firstly, here are the symptoms you might experience:
• Drive shows up fine, but during format it exists unexpectedly and comes up with an error.
• Boots only to the spinning symbol under neath the Apple logo, and stalls
• It works fine in an external USB enclosure with external power supply.
• After a PRAM reset, it might actually boot up, but then it stalls as an error warning of disk disconnect appears.
The problem is your computers firmware. If you've installed the EFI 1.7 update, the drive won't work. If you downgrade to EFI 1.6, then it will.
Here's how:
1. Download this: http://rs475.rapidshare.com/files/275188610/Aluminum_MacBook_Pro_Recovery.dmg
2. Get a USB memory stick
3. Open up Disk Utility, in Utilities and format the USB stick as Mac OS X Journaled (GUID Partition map)
4. Choose the restore pane up top, and select the source to be
the disk image you just downloaded
and the target to be
the memory stick volume you just created.
5. Restart you mac holding down the option key.
6. MAKE SURE YOU'RE CONNECTED TO A POWER SUPPLY!
7. Choose to boot up from the memory stick.
The firmware downgrade will commence and restart, when done.
That's it. Your Crucial SSD will now work perfectly.
