Early 2011 Macbook Pro kernel panic on boot from Snow Leopard flash drive

[hormelmeatcompa]

I have an early 2011 13" MBP and wanted to create a flash drive I could boot Snow Leopard from for reinstallation. I imaged the OS DVD that came with the machine onto my hard drive and then imaged the flash drive (8GB) with that DMG. When I try to boot the machine from the drive, it shows the Apple logo for about 2 seconds and then kernel panics. Holding option upon boot to select the boot device works fine and the drive itself pops up the custom Finder window with the Install app shortcut and documentation folders the way a normal OS X DVD would upon insertion.

Furthermore, I tried the drive on an early 2008 Macbook and it was able to successfully boot to the OS X installer.

The kernel panic happens when I imaged the flash drive both from the OS DVD included with my machine and when I imaged the drive from a plain vanilla retail DVD of Snow Leopard.

Any ideas?

 

[hormelmeatcompa]

Postscript: Trying to boot from the flash drive in safe mode gives the same result.

 

[ikm19]

I had the same problem. Apple Genius says that macbook pro 2011 has newer cpu then the snow leopard vanilla was build it for.

 

[lauph]

Why not just boot it off the DVD when:
1. You have the DVD.
2. You have a Superdrive.

 

[hormelmeatcompa]

@Lauph: Flash drives are faster and I want a flash drive that's Mac-agnostic (my MBP 2011 DVD will not install on the older Macbook). And I lost my original retail Snow Leopard DVD.