OCZ Vertex 3 not showing up on Disk Utility (2011 17" Macbook Pro)

I have a problem with my 120GB Vertex 3 installed on my 2011 Macbook Pro. It wouldn't boot after the apple logo after using it for a while...I tried starting up my mac with safe mode, commad+c,command+v,and command+option+p+r but it didn't help.
So I took out the vertex form my mac and then replaced it with the original toshiba hard drive, opened disk utility but the vertex didn't even show up.
before that, I also tried booting with the mac os x disk (vertex inside the mbp) and opened disk utility from it but I had the same result.

Chris,
I had a similar problem. This was with a brand new Vertex 3 that I tried to install into the system. It would not be recognized by Disk Utility or Time Machine Restore from the OSX 10.6 boot CD.
Here is my solution to the problem:
1) I put the original 250GB HDD back into the system. I used Disk Utility to format it to only use the first 120GB of the disk, leaving the rest blank (OSX reserves a 200MB partition, so the exact size of the system partition is 119.69 GB (119,690,170,368 bytes)). You can always make it 1-2 GB smaller, to be safe.
2) I used Time Machine to restore the system onto the original HDD.
3) I placed the OCZ Vertex 3 into an external USB enclosure. I then re-booted the system into Gparted using a Linux live CD (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/)
4) I used the Linux command dd (http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)) to make a byte-for-byte copy of the two disks. dd will stop when the Vertex 3 becomes full, so you need be absolutely sure that your partition is small enough.
Here is the dd syntax: if stands for input file (source disk), of stands for output file (target disk). It takes a really long time, and has no indication of its progress. You can tell it is working by seeing the external enclosure LED blink.
>dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
dd is a standard UNIX command and comes with OSX too. You could always try this from the Terminal application from the OSX boot CD. I did it using Linux, because I am slightly more famailiar with Linux over Unix command line.
The internal (standard HDD) hard drive should be mounted on sda. The Vertex 3 (inside the USB enclosure) might be sdb, but if there are other disks present it might not be. Use dd with extreme caution! I highly suggest that you detach all other disks (such as the Time Machine disk) before attempting this. If you set of= to the wrong disk, it will completely wipe it out.
5) Swap drives. Computer boots, everything works!
6) (Optional)... if you made the partition smaller than the Vertex 3, you can try to resize it to use the full capacity of the disk with Disk Utility from within OSX.
Let me know if this was helpful. Send me a reply or PM if you need any more detailed instructions. I would be glad to help.
-Sam

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