help with installing snow leopard from an external drive

[Queen of Spades]

I have always installed Snow Leopard on my machines from an external hard drive partition - I image the SL disc, then restore the image to the partition. It has always worked great and been much faster than installing via disc. I've also gone the optibay route on this machine, so I no longer have the disc drive. I could have the drive sent to me (it's with my stuff in CA), but I'd rather just resolve this somehow.

So I just bought a new hard drive for my core i5 MBP that I want to format and insall SL on cleanly. For some reason, installing from the SL image partition is no longer working.

When I hold down option upon startup, the Mac OS X Install partition comes up, but when I select it, the computer stays on the apple gray screen. I have tried formatting and restoring the image, it doesn't work.

Does anyone have any ideas? Has something changed? Or is there another way I can install SL cleanly on my new drive? I do have a 2.5" enclosure, as well as an external drive. Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[robbieduncan]

Is the image of a version of SL older than the MBP originally shipped with?

 

[Queen of Spades]

Is the image of a version of SL older than the MBP originally shipped with?

It might be, yes. It's a retail copy of SL, I don't use the imaged discs of what came with the computer. Is that the problem?

If so, you're a genius.

 

[robbieduncan]

It might be, yes. It's a retail copy of SL, I don't use the imaged discs of what came with the computer. Is that the problem?

If so, you're a genius.

If it's older than the version that first shipped with that machine then yes. One of the things that change in the version of the OS are the available platform drivers. An older version of the OS won't have platform drivers for newer machines. This is why Apple often ship custom builds of the current OS version with brand-new machines: the add the platform drivers that then get synced into the main tree for the next point release.

 

[Queen of Spades]

If it's older than the version that first shipped with that machine then yes. One of the things that change in the version of the OS are the available platform drivers. An older version of the OS won't have platform drivers for newer machines. This is why Apple often ship custom builds of the current OS version with brand-new machines: the add the platform drivers that then get synced into the main tree for the next point release.

Thank you, that was driving me nuts. I am going to trek through the snow and borrow my BIL's copy of 10.6.3 and give it a whirl. Much appreciated.