Samsung EVO 480 *and* stock hard drive not recognised by Snow Leopard installer A friend of mine came to me with her Macbook Pro 8,3 (17 inch, 2011). The hard drive had failed, and booting into the recovery disk didn't show a working hard drive.

I went out and bought her a samsung EVO 480 (because why not do an upgrade while I'm at it?), and plugged it in.

Still not recognised by Disk Utility on the install disk.

I went back and reformatted the disk as HFS+ with my windows machine, using MacDrive. Put it back in the laptop, and it's still not turning up in the list.

I have confirmed that the SSD has the latest firmware on it using Samsung's magician software, and I'm now focusing on the SATA cable.

Though I'm not sure what my options are for diagnosis and replacement of parts now, as I haven't ever had to deal with a broken cable! Any ideas, anyone?
The answer in this particular instance was that the SATA cable had come loose. Unscrewing the metal grate housing and re-pressing the connector to the mobo fixed it, and the HFS+ formatted Samsung 840 EVO SSD worked in the macbook pro.

The original hard drive still works, but will now be put in the optical bay instead of the superdrive.