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Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook install issues

CheeseBread365

CheeseBread365

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 27, 2017
141
13
Ann Arbor, MI
I've purchased a Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook that came with no hard drive. This laptop supports up to Mac OS X El Capitan, so I threw in my 500gb El Capitan hard drive. The progress bar got about to halfway, then froze. I did a pram reset, and now instead of freezing, the display would turn off. I tried many different USB Mac OS installers and the only version of Mac OS I've gotten to boot sucessfully is Mac OS Lion. However, when I go to install it, it says that it could not install additional components. I'm not sure why its doing this, or how to fix it. Any help would be appreciated.
 
CheeseBread365 said:
I did a pram reset, and now instead of freezing, the display would turn off.
Click to expand...
Boot in verbose mode (hold cmd-v after turning on) to see what's happening when it turns off.

CheeseBread365 said:
Mac OS Lion. However, when I go to install it, it says that it could not install additional components.
Click to expand...
Try setting the date to 2012 before installing Lion. The installer's signature has (probably) expired by now.
 
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First thing I'd do is do some memory swapping/troubleshooting. If you can get an OS to boot, run Rember to test what is installed. You may also be looking at a damaged SATA cable to your drive or a bad connection.
 
Hrududu said:
First thing I'd do is do some memory swapping/troubleshooting. If you can get an OS to boot, run Rember to test what is installed. You may also be looking at a damaged SATA cable to your drive or a bad connection.
Click to expand...
I've tried swapping out the ram, and I also suspected it was the sata cable, but the thing is it wont boot from USB either.
 
Amethyst1 said:
Boot in verbose mode (hold cmd-v after turning on) to see what's happening when it turns off.
Click to expand...
1626644429388.png
 
Will the Mac boot in Safe Mode?

To try that you'd hold down the SHIFT key after the Mac chimes (keep holding down until you get to the login screen).
 
eyoungren said:
Will the Mac boot in Safe Mode?

To try that you'd hold down the SHIFT key after the Mac chimes (keep holding down until you get to the login screen).
Click to expand...
So, trying to boot into safe mode, it hasn't black screened, but its been hanging on the boot progress part about 2/3 through for 30 mins now.
 
I have the same model macbook and if memory serves me correctly, I had some problems wth the installer on an external drive as well because I was a dumb dumb and created an incorrect partition scheme of Master boot Record vs GUID (in my defense, this was an ext hard drive with installers from tiger to El Cap on it and I goofed up this one). Anyhoo, that caused the installer to fail, (didnt realize my mistake until after I had installed to elcap lol) so I too installed Lion from another flashdrive installer with the correct partition scheme. With a functioning Lion install, I then download the el cap file via itunes from there and proceeded. Initially, the elcap installation sequence would fail because the elcap installer signature had expired - and to fix that is to reset the date to after 8-01-2014 following the instruction above. This allowed the installer to complete and voila, el cap. Long story short, make sure the partition scheme on your flash driveis GIUD. :p

On a separate note, if you were not aware, your macbook is able to utilize 8gb ram vs advertised 6 with an EFI update.

www.macrumors.com

'Secret' Firmware Update Unlocks Support for 8 GB RAM on 'Late 2008' Notebooks

In a blog post published last week, Other World Computing unravels a mystery that has seen conflicting information over whether "Late 2008"...
www.macrumors.com www.macrumors.com
 
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