can't install (snow) leopard nor tiger or anyhthing

[fromalk]

hello everyone,

only read the quoted part if you want the whole story or if you have some spare time

I've been so fed up with my macbook pro and apple (both apple and there retailers) lately that I turn to you as a last resort. Since it's really late and I'm exhausgted I'll try to put it in a nutshell.

I'm a student / programmer / webdesigner / enterpreneur / eventplanner. That's a lot and thats the reason my days are so packed. I own a macbook pro (the aluminium one) and its truly a great computer, i love it to dead. Next week (exactly) it turns 2 years old. There have been problems in the past but the majority is due to bad service.

So to the point. I use my laptop 24/7, I shut it down for a few hours once every 6-7months and am continiously working on it. It came with a 120gb hard drive that was packed with all my files (excl music etc, just work files).

A few weeks ago I had my hard drive replaced for a bigger one (320gb same rpm 5400). At that time my superdrive was broken and since I needed it for a project I was allready running late on I had the work done at a shop where I normally would never go. They are an official apple reseller/center but I have had nothing but bad experiances on all 6 macbook (pro's) i bought and brought there. The only reason I went there is because they are the only one in my whole country that let you skip the queue (if you pay a lot extra for your service). How hard can it be to replace a superdrive and a hard drive right...

When I had my 120gb my mbp worked like a charm, everything loaded fast. Only flash animations/websites/movies would tend to lag sometimes.

I picked up my mbp (even though I paid nearly 200€ for the appointment my mbp was ready 5 hours to late but I was happy since I could start working on it). Put a kopie of the time machine back up of my 120gb drive on the 320gb drive. I then put all my music (25gb) from my external hard drive on the 320gb internal drive & about 3 gb of pictures. That brings the total to +- 148gb used out of 320gb.

First thing I notice is how slow my computer got! Redicilous, at first I thought it was because I just put all the music and photos on it (very stupid thought though but hey). And it just got worse and worse and worse. A few days later I notice several keys dont work very well anymore.

The first spot available in my agenda I returned the mbp to a repair center (+- 2 weeks later) but a different one since I was so fed up with yet another bad repair. I told them about the problem with the kehyboard which they fixed and showed them how slow it got after the new hard drive was installed. Since they charge 80euros/hour for software interventions they adviced me to just reinstall everything, format the thing and just do a clean install.

I HATE formatting, every time something gets lost or cant be found anymore. Untill today. To illustrate how slow my mbp got:
- it takes 7minutes and 56 seconds to start and login
- it takes 3 minutes and 5 seconds to open a new tab in safari and surf to google.com
- itunes can't play a single song without lagging 70% of the time
- I watched kevin rose's latest youtube clip, I saw approx the first 100 frames and then video froze but audio just went on perfectly
- it took 15 minutes to open a new tab and type forums.macrumors.com in the adress bar, I didn't even connect to this forum

Enough is enough. I have a lot of work to do tommorow and didn't sleep last night either because my laptop got so slow. So I decided to format it.

Just one more thing first; The weird thing is that it didn't always run slow. 40% of the time it still worked decently fast but when it started to lag there was just nothing to do with it anymore. Just leave it for a few hours and come back to it.

So I erased the drive, snow leopard starts installing 30 minutes left, ......... 30 minutes left, .......... 30 minutes left, .... I restarted the installation 5 times and waited my fair share every time. I then tried to install leopard, the installer started and did it's thing for 10 minutes and then crashed. So I got my tiger disks out and even those didn't work

What the **** is wrong with this computer? I'm really sick of it, either it gets fixed tomorow or I'm just buying a new computer.

 

[MisterMe]

For future reference, when you need help give the information relevant to the help that you need. We don't need the story of how your family got its name.

Now to the point: You can install Tiger on an Intel Mac only if that is the OS on the computer's System Restore disc. You can only use a gray System Restore disc to install the OS on the same model computer that shipped with the disc. To upgrade MacOS X, you must use a retail copy of a newer version of MacOS X [on a black disc].

 

[xgman]

It sounds like something is failing inside your computer. These things can be very hard to diagnose. Could be the drive starting to fail. Have your run repair on it from disk utility? Could be a bad stick of mem, on and on. I'd bring it back to that shop and have them reload the os and test it again.

 

[fromalk]

For future reference, when you need help give the information relevant to the help that you need. We don't need the story of how your family got its name.

Now to the point: You can install Tiger on an Intel Mac only if that is the OS on the computer's System Restore disc. You can only use a gray System Restore disc to install the OS on the same model computer that shipped with the disc. To upgrade MacOS X, you must use a retail copy of a newer version of MacOS X [on a black disc].

that's why the irrelevant part is between the quote. No offense off course and non taken .

I know about the discs and how they should be used. The grey discs, containing tiger, came with my mbp and don't work .The upgrade dvd's being both leopard and snow leopard don't work either...

It sounds like something is failing inside your computer. These things can be very hard to diagnose. Could be the drive starting to fail. Have your run repair on it from disk utility? Could be a bad stick of mem, on and on. I'd bring it back to that shop and have them reload the os and test it again.

I called apple a few hours after opening this topic and the tech person on the line suggested a replacement macbook pro since there have already been so many repairs. I'm going to take them up on that offer tomorrow. The tech person suggested I brought I by my service point and let them test it. So I did and there weren't any problems. I then asked them to install the OS, it just didn't work. They tried there own discs etc... They did confess to not using an apple branded hard drive when I had mine upgraded. Now I know this shouldn't make a difference but I'm still upset about the principe, I paid way more then the drive is worth, if it where branded apple I wouldn't have cared.

So they put an image of a clean installation on my system and I was able to continue work. I restored my mailbox, documents, iphoto & itunes. Still it lags and crashes. The crashes don't occur that much but are still very frustrating. It's those lags that I can't stand anymore. Opening any kind of document takes forever.

Hope the tech guy tomorrow will be as nice as the previous one.