Chosen Solution
I installed a SSD in my 2010 Macbook pro. I put the old hard drive in in an external case and the mac booted from there when turned on. Disk Utility is up on the screen. I am unclear on how to proceed. I need to format the new SSD and I want to copy OSX from the old hard drive to the new drive so that the mac boots from the new drive. I do not want to use the internet on the 2010 computer that I am working on (it hasn’t been used for years (bad battery that i recently replaced) and i just want a dedicated word processing machine. I hoped that it would be possible to just copy over the OSX and contents of old drive through Disk Utility.
Depending on the OS these ran, you may need a DVD for the reinstall. The issue is internet recovery was not standard until 2011. If you had it running 10.6-~10.8, there is no internet recovery. However, 10.10-10.13 installations did enable it after the firmware upgrades were moved from installers to the OS updates. CAUTION: YOU NEED A SATA III SSD WITH A SATA II FALLBACK, MINIMUM - THE MCP89 DOES NOT SUPPORT SATA III! To see if yours is one of the DVD required units (or if you can use internet recovery), press Command+Option+R - the Option key is important as it forces internet recovery. Once you do that if you see a globe, you’re set to use internet recovery. If not you’ll need to install this EFI update. If not, download a copy of 10.8 and then install High Sierra, and enable internet recovery :-). If you wanted to as well, you can always make a USB boot drive and install that way. While yes you can directly download 10.13 and get there immediately, you may have to install a older OS to bump it up to being able to use internet recovery. Once you do that, format it as HFS Extended (Journaled) in Disk Utility, and then you’re good to reinstall. You do not need to enable WiFi anymore once you have MacOS reinstalled.
It sounds like you want to copy the OS install to the new drive. To do this: Power down the machine.Plug in the external HDD caddy.Press the power button then immediately start holding Command+R.Let go of the Command+R keys when you see “MacOS Utitilies".Double-Click “Disk Utility“Click View in the toolbar and click Show all Devices.Format the new drive with the partition name Mac HD.In the Mac HD partition, click Restore. Choose the Macintosh HD partition and press Choose.Wait until the contents from the old drive have been transferred to the new drive.Power down the computer.Unplug the old drive.Reboot the computer.
