Replacing HD With SSD, Need To Install OS X (Not Clone Old HD) On New SSD

Believe it or not, a clone of your old boot drive onto a blank powered, Disk Utility formatted GUID / OS X Extended (Journaled )external drive is the safest choice.

This gives you something to boot the computer with in case of trouble with the SSD, when formatting it and reverse cloning everything back on.

I know what you said, you want a clean install of OS X. However in 10.7 and later to install OS X fresh needs the Recovery HD partiton to be booted from, on the boot drive, to download 10.7 from Apple's servers.

So the object here is to clone your old boot drive clone to the formatted SSD of everything, OS X and Recovery Partition (plus any Apple hidden gems), then when that's completed, later boot into Recovery HD and wipe just the Macintosh HD partiton clean and clean install OS X there again.

There is only one software that can do this and it's Carbon Copy Cloner. Superdupes can't clone Recovery HD.

Just use the CCC's default setting to clone one drive to another. Hold the option key down while booting to enter Startup Manager, where you can select which drive you want to boot from.

To first format any blank or soon ot be overwrtitten drive, use Disk Utility to select the entire drive and Partition: Options: GUID and OS X ext. jorun., as the format.

To erase the Macnitosh HD partition, hold command r boot from the SSD to enter Recovery HD and select the Macintosh HD partiton in Disk Utility to erase it. Then quit and floow the instructions to reinstall 10.7 fresh from Apple's servers.

There is plenty of good info here

https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

Another method is to put just Recovery HD on a external USB thumb drive, boot from it and install 10.7, this has to be done before the old drive is removed obviously.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/08/lion-recovery-disk-assistant-tool-makes-external- lion-boot-recovery-drives/

Another method, is if your machine has Internet Recovery, is to hold option command r while booting to your local wifi (use a Ethernet cable) and Recovery HD is downloaded (wait) from Apple's servers which you can install and thus 10.7 afterwards.

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

However Recovery HD is limited, you don't have the full capabilites of your older boot drive like a clone provides.

Also there might be identification issues when you try to download your free iLife or other AppStore copy protected software.

Why I think you should go with a clone just in case regardless, because you really don't want to reopen the machine to place the older boot drive back in.

http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/