I recently added a solid-state drive (SSD) to a 2011 MacBook Pro 15″ to use as a new boot / applications drive.¹ The MacBook Pro came with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion installed, and I installed the new SSD using the same method I’ve used with every other machine I’ve owned in the pas:t

1. I partitioned the SSD into a single volume with a GIUD partition table, choosing Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) as the file system.
2. I used SuperDuper! to clone my old drive to the SSD
3. I used Disk Utility.app and ran Repair Disk on the SSD (In the past, I have had problems booting from newly-cloned SSDs in the past without first repairing).

I rebooted the MacBook Pro, and everything seemed to work perfectly—the Mac booted quickly and was immediately an order of magnitude more responsive (as is normal when using a machine with SSD storage). However, when I went into the Security & Privacy preference pane to enable FileVault (FileVault 2), it gave me an error message:

FileVault can’t be turned on for the disk XXX. Some disk formats don’t support the recovery partition required for encryption.

It turns out that FileVault cannot be enabled on drives that do not have the Recovery HD partition that is created when Mac OS X Lion is installed. Because I had cloned the bootable volume to the new hard disk without actually installing Lion first, no Recovery HD partition was every created. To solve this problem, I had to first install Lion onto the destination hard disk (the SSD). The installation process creates the necessary Recovery HD partition. After installing Lion, I again cloned my old volume onto the new volume (on the SSD) using SuperDuper!.²

I have just completed this process, and FileVault is now encrypting my SSD.

Useful links/information:

• To download the Mac OS X Lion installer without installing it, run App Store and hold the Option key down while you click on the Purchases tab, and when you click on “Install Mac OS X Lion”. The Install Mac OS X Lion app will be downloaded into your Applications folder. When you run the installer, it will self-destruct, so be sure to back it up somewhere. [more info]
• To burn your own Mac OS X Lion install DVD or USB drive, follow the instructions here.