Reinstalling Lion on a 3rd party SSD

I've purchased an SSD drive INTEL SSDSA2CW120G3 and had a guy in Apple Reseller store clone the original HDD to the SSD.

The problem is, that the original HDD was almost dead and there were some problems while cloning. They also cloned some kind of hidden/encrypted partition, which is required for Lion.

They told me that I should use my Snow Leopard install DVD to format the main data partition and then reinstall Snow Leopard and upgrade to Lion from App Store.

They also said something about having problems with cloning the hidden partition.

Is there any safe way that I can check, if I'm going to be able to install Snow Leopard and then safely upgrade to Lion after I format the SSD? Or even better, is there any way to install Lion directly?

edit: looking at the restore partition, it looks like it's empty

Solution 1:

The Recovery HD partition is not meant to be clone-able. They clearly failed and had no idea what they were doing when it came to that stage.

Running the Lion installer will install that Recovery HD partition properly. Please note that the Recovery HD partition is not required for Lion, but can be useful if you have any boot errors and need to reinstall Lion at a later date.

Re-installing Snow Leopard from a Lion install will not work, the user account details are slightly different between Snow Leopard and Lion (found that out the hard way), this would essentially render your user account useless.

Good Luck!

P.S. I'd advise you don't go back to that reseller, they have no clue what they're doing.

P.P.S. iampearce's comment about the drive being physically in the machine before installing Lion is irrelevant, and incorrect. The files that are used during the installer are loaded according to the machine hardware you boot from.

Solution 2:

Use this - it runs you through how to use it. You just need to download the app from the app store and follow the instructions.