OS X Yosemite 10.10.1 Time Machine backup will not restore to Fusion Drive in Early 2011 Macbook Pro 8,1

Back Story

For the past couple of years, I've been using my MBP with great results under OS X 10.7.x Lion. The specs: moved the 320gb factory 5400 spinner to the optical bay and installed an OCZ Vertex 4 256gb SSD in the main SATA spot.

I've installed OS updates but nothing past Lion. The OS has been running on the SSD while the spinning drive in the optical bay has been used for storage.

I've decided to make the jump to Yosemite 10.10.1 but wanted a fresh install rather than upgrading. I did quite a bit of research regarding the use of 3rd party SSDs, HDDs, Fusion, etc. I read countless blogs and forum threads before touching anything.

Although I have several Time Machine backups already, I decided to make a new backup on a different drive than my standard backup drive. In addition, I made a complete clone of both drives (OS on SSD and storage on spinner) to a fresh 1TB drive so I could at least boot to that if I needed to use anything while in this process (going on a week now).

After all backups were complete, I pushed forward!

I removed the 320gb and replaced it with a 1tb HGST 7200 SATA III. Before removing this of course, I made sure that my machine would support the SATA III drive, and it did. I learned that some of the 2011 MBPs were hit-and-miss with the optical bay port; some were only 3 Gb/s. After attempting to format everthing, I was having a problem locating the new 1tb 7200 drive in the optical bay. I verified that it worked with my USB adapter so I swapped the drives. Now the spinner is in the main SATA port and the SSD has been moved to the optical port. Both can be seen by disk utility (USB boot from Yosemite Install Disk).

I want to create a Fusion Drive instead of managing the storage disk separately like I was with Lion. I formatted both drives with 1 GUID partition each and successfully created a Logical Volume Group and then a usable volume from the Group. I successfully created a Fusion Drive; two drives into 1, now called Macintosh HD.

I continued with the installer creating the recovery partition and made it through the install without any problems, or so I thought. Upon rebooting I was faced with the white screen and probihitory symbol (circle with a slash). I was able to remove my instal USB drive and restart with cmd+r to boot in recovery mode from the internal boot disk. I could then see via diskutil that the Logical Volume Group was still intact and there was the recovery partion (which I was currently booting from) along with the Macintosh HD partition which appeared to have the 12 or so gigs of data that I would suspect the OS would take up from a fresh install.

I referred to several articles using 3rd party SSDs and disabling kext signing since I wasn't using "Apple Verified Drives." This led me to http://ift.tt/1vUIizO. After trying their solution to disable kext signing and then another reboot, the apple logo apperared for a few seconds with the proress bar below and immediately went back to the prohibitory symbol.

I reset the NVRAM, and reinstalled Yosemite again with the same results as before I manually tried to bypass the kext signing. This time I tried bypassing the kext signing with this version http://ift.tt/17hrysE which didn't seem to work for me either. Upon reboot, the same prohibitory sybol awaited me after about 6 seconds of the apple logo.

I spent a lot more time reading blogs and forums and tried various other things but didn't get it to boot into OS X.

Next, I deleted the Logical Volume group and started fresh with both drives independent of each other. I decided to do an internet recovery. From there I was able to get a fresh copy of Lion to my system, and updated to 10.10.1. I restarted the computer several times using Restart and Shut Down commands and even reset the NVRAM a couple times and never had a problem booting back up to Yosemite. I then made a Time Machine backup and restored it to the other disk. I now how the identical Yosemite OS on both the 256gb SSD in the optical bay and the 1tb 7200 HDD in the main SATA port.

I shall note that I never had to bypass the kext signing.

Enough of the Back Story

Now that I have verified that my machine can run Yosemite 10.10.1 on both drives independently, naturally I decided to strip the drives back down and format them how I originally intended as a Fusion Drive. If I recall correctly (I've formatted these drives so many different times in the past week) I had to delete the Logical Volume Group on each disk since Yosemite created them (even though I wasn't using Fusion Drives). Then got each disk formatted with 1 GUID partion, created a Logical Volume Group and then a usable volume. This all appeared to work great; I could now see my 1.25tb Fusion Drive ready for a Time Machine backup.

I then booted from the Yosemite USB Installer, went through the steps to restore from a Time Machine backup which was on an external drive. I chose the backup of 10.10.1 (same one that I previously loaded), selected the destination (the only drive listed was the new 1.25tb drive that I created) chose to continue. For the first couple of attempts, I didn't watch the progress. When returning to my machine, I was greeted back to the welcome/install screen from the installer (to continue in English...)

After a couple of tries, I decided to sit and watch the recovery. When the progress bar reached approximately 50% (10-15min) I was greeted with the window displaying "Success!" and the progress bar with half remaining. Below that, it was counting down "the machine will restart in 10..9..8.." It stopped at 8 and hung. I let it sit for a few minutes and noticed that header/task bar above (apple icon and menus) weren't respondig so I decided to force-quit by holding down the power button.

After booting yet again, I was back to the same welcome/install screen as before. I removed the TM drive and booted in recovery mode, launched terminal, could see the Logical Volume Group, recovery partition, but noticed that the OS X volume was about 4.5gb or so.

Like I mentioned, I've read countless blogs and forums, tried countless re-boots, re-installs, but can't seem to get the Yosemite to run from a Fusion Drive. I've heard of others with my dated MBP (and older) work. I understand that I can continue like I did with Lion and manually manage my spinning drive but would like to make this Fusion Drive work.

Any suggestions?