Resolved Installing Snow Leopard shouldn't be this frustrating!

Hey guys,

I'm new to the forum here, so I'm sorry if I'm repeating an old problem but I've spent many hours scouring the web about my problem with no success.

My problem: I want to install a Retail Mac OS X 10.6.3 SL onto a new SSD on my Macbook2,1 (2006) but I just can't get it to install.

I've tried installing from the DVD drive but at around 28 minutes it fails. Since it's old, I figure the DVD drive is faulty; after ripping an image of the disk on another mac with no problems, I can say I'm pretty sure of it.

That being the case, I've also tried installing via USB Flash Drive but I can't for the life of me get it to boot from USB! For that I used both Carbon Copy Cloner and Disk Utility to restore the install disk as a backup. I set it to boot from USB under Startup Disk, and I even blessed it: but it still refuses to boot.

PRAM has also been reset several times but it didn't seem to help.


My Macbook Specs:
1.83Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
2.25GB RAM
8x Combo Drive
60GB 5400RPM SATA ===> OCZ Agility 3 120GB SSD


I just don't know what's wrong I really appreciate any help and I hope others with the same issue share what worked/didn't work.

Thanks!

aziatiklover said:

Have SL on a usb and boot it from there? What does it do when you tried?

Click to expand...

Thanks for the prompt reply. I put Snow Leopard onto USB and tried to boot it with that, but it's completely ignored at startup.

Jaben3421 said:

Did you make sure your MacBook can support that type of SATA? I think the new agilites are SATA 3, but your MacBook has SATA 1 if I'm not mistaken. I don't know. Might be wrong. I can't remember if the hard drives have backwards compatibility. My guess, however, is that your MacBook can't support it.

Click to expand...

From what I've read online, SATA should be backwards-compatible... it'll just be bottlenecked

boneskid1 said:

The ssd is not an issue it very well might be your drive but instead of trying to boot from usb , plug the USB into the macbook and go into finder within the USB drive and find the DMG for SL and click on it. It should allow you to install from there if not I apologize for being wrong.

Click to expand...

I figure it wouldn't hurt to mention all the facts, just in case. Do you mean the Snow Leopard icon on the installer itself? I tried clicking it to restart my mac with the installer, but that wouldn't work either

I'm using a Kingston USB Thumbdrive and yes, I have formatted it with GUID partition table and Mac OS Extended Journaled. As far as I can tell, the SSD and disc are in good working order as well.

I haven't tried booting with another mac, but I'll give that a shot.

@DewGuy1999 That's definitely possible, apparently it's happened before too: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/993178/

Anyway I'll try both methods and post my results here soon.

Yes, I tried starting up holding the ALT/Option key but the usb drive never shows up there. Holding 'C' doesn't work either.

Great success!!

I got it to work!

So I went out and bought an HDD docking station and formatted an old SATA1 drive lying around with GUID partition table, OS X extended journaled, etc. and lo and behold, it finally boots from USB.

Everything else was smooth sailing

I'm convinced that USB booting on this macbook needs to be from some powered USB device like an external drive, which is weird because the USB ports read about about 5V the moment I boot, according to my multimeter.

Anyway thank you guys for your help, hopefully this thread saves someone else a lot of frustration.