New hard drive is not recognized by my MacBook Pro.

Recovery Disk Assistant requires 10.7, so that stuff does not apply to you.

If you can see your Hard drive, select it and partition it to have one partition.

Grant has you in good hands, 🙂

In 10.7, Recovery_HD can help you with that stuff. But under 10.6, you need Mac OS X present to do the heavy lifting.

Its just as easy to Update using Software Update as it is to restore Mac OS X, so you can do the Mac OS X part either by updating or by Restoring.

This article lays out all the options:

Pondini.org: Setting-up a new Mac from an old one, its backups, or a PC

Thanks for this - tried it for my Mum's old eMac & it worked brilliantly x

I am having the exact same issue:

Replaced a hard drive in a macbook (with an appropriate SSD), that is now not recognized.

Formatted correctly (Journalled, GUID).

I can boot from the 10.6 install DVD

(the original install disks say they cannot install on this machine;

perhaps due to a firmware update at some point).

I can get to disk utility, but the internal hard disk does not appear.

Firewire drives appear. USB Drives appear. I know the new hard drive is good

because I tested it on a drive sled in a Mac Pro, and disk utility recognized it.

I am wondering what could be the issue (and am naturally loathe

to take it to a shop and drop $80 if there is a solution I can implement).

Using the Hardware Test on the original install disks did not work.

I will next try the network hardware test using ethernet and Option-D.

Suggestions?

Good Karma to you!

Similar happened to me on my MacBook 3,1 but my actions were different than others regarding success:

1. Installed Avant 240GB SSD and attempted to install a Time Machine backup but the software didn't recognize the SSD.

2. Checked to see if SSD was installed upside down (it wasn't) and tried again, same result, SSD not recognized.

3. Tried to reinstall OS and software still didn't recognize the SSD to install OS to.

4. Went into Disk Utility and SSD was listed there. Selecting SSD showed it listed as 'unformatted drive'.

5. I formatted the SSD using Disk Utility and repeated process from step 1 and SSD was now recognized to be able to select it as the designation of the Time Machine restore.