Chosen Solution
I have installed a brand new solid state hard drive in my macbook pro 13" mid 2009. I replaced the old hard drive because it was failing. Now that I have the new hard drive installed I am struggling to get OS X installed onto the new hard drive. I have ruled out using a USB enclosure on the old hard drive because it was failing. I do have the original OSX snow leopard start up disk. I have tried using this to install OSX onto the new HDD but it would not work. I think it might be because the new HDD is unformatted? I have also been into disk utility to try to resolve this but this does not work. I have tried partitioning the new HDD but I get an error message “Partition failed …. POSIX reports: The operation cannot be completed. Cannot allocate memory”. I have also tried the restore function in Disk Utility to restore the disk using my time machine backup disk, but I get the error “Could not erase target - Operation not permitted” I have also tried to restore the HDD from a time machine backup, but when I try to select a Destination it says the “disk does not have enough space to restore your system” Any suggestions on how to solve this would be much appreciated!
Well, if your old HD fails and the new one makes problems.. then you might consider checking your HDD cable, maybe that’s causing the drives to fail. Also try to download a ubuntu live cd or just gparted to format the drive. Maybe it will work.
I agree with Buco about a possible HD/IR cable failure, they are very common on this model and can destroy the hard drive. Your machine has a Int. HD Interface: Serial ATA (3 Gb/s). The Crucial drive is a 6 Gb/s and I have not been able to verify that it is backward compatible, but probably is. Check with Crucial to be sure.
