Prohibited symbol trying to boot into Recovery Mode
This is exactly the type of convoluted situation that calls for having a 3rd party software cloning utility in your toolset. If you need to transfer Apps, system settings &amp; one or more user profiles to the replacement SSD then using a cloning tool would be ideal. It would enable you to clone just the boot partition to the SSD after which you would need to reinstall the OS from an internet restore session so as to get a functional local restore partition on the SSD as well. This can be done without harming the data that already exists on the drive.

If you want to reuse the original drive for backups as an example, then once you can successfully boot from the SSD you can reconnect the old drive &amp; use Disk Utility to repartition it so you have access to its entire storage volume.