Mac won't boot into Recovery Mode

[Chuckoir]

Hi all - I'm after a bit of help installing OSX on a new SSD.

I'm powering on the Mac, whilst holding down the Option Key and the boot menu comes up (where it lists the HDD and 10.9 Recovey).

I select 10.9 Recovery, the Apple logo appears and the spinny thing underneath - it does that for maybe 20 seconds then the Mac powers off.

I've also created a Recovery disk using a USB thumb drive - I select it on the recovery menu, but all the Mac does power off after 20 seconds or so. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, nor why I can't boot into Recovery in order to install OSX on my new SSD. Any ideas?

Mac specs are as follows:
Macbook Pro 13" - Late 2011
2.4GHz Intel Core i5
Running OSX 10.9.5

Another option I've considered, would be to clone the Hard Drive to the new SSD, install the SSD, then boot to that - would that work?

Many thanks in advance for any offer of advice/assistance.

 

[chscag]

I'm trying to understand what it is you're trying to do? It sounds like you installed the SSD and now you're trying to boot to it by holding down the Option key? That won't work because you haven't formatted the SSD nor prepared it for use. Go ahead and clone your hard drive to the SSD as that should work. Not ideal, but may be the easiest way. You also should consider upgrading your version of OS X to the latest.