Macbook HD upgrade disaster

[dmm219]

I'm starting to get a bad feeling Apple screwed something up royally in their latest update to snow leapard...

Here's the story: I have a 08 macbook (black), 2.4 Ghz core 2 duo with 4 G ram and a 250 G HD. Last night I attempted to upgrade my HD to a 320 GB and all hell broke lose.

I've done this job many times on my wife's white macbook with never an issue.
This time...a nightmare...

First, I made sure to make a new TM backup on a usb HD and checked it. Next I popped in the new HD and my original snow leapord disk to install osx on my new HD and restore from my TM back up. I Did a full restore, everything went fine until I rebooted afterwords.

I now get a bunch of "panic" text right after I turn on the computer, with a message in a bunch of languages to hold down the power button to reboot. I can not do anything else and I am not in the install menu...it happens before the apple logo even appears. It happens no matter if the SL install disc is in the drive or not.

I threw my old HD back in and all is fine, but now my new 320G HD is useless...i can't even get access to it to wipe it...

Any body have any ideas what went wrong and what I can do to wipe the new HD?

I've been reading other stories lately where TM backups of the latest SL release and failing when you go to restore them...

 

[riptideMBP]

since youre doing a full restore, it would alleviate a lot of problems if you did a clone instead... To do this, download a copy of carbon copy cloner and do a full backup to your external (uncheck delete items if you have things you need on the external). Then install the new hard drive. Next boot from the external using the option key. Run disk utility and format the internal drive as mac osx extended journaled, using a GUID partition table. Now run CCC again, this time cloning the external to the internal. Lastly go to system preferences --> startup disk and select the internal hard drive. Once you reboot everything should be good (i would do the startup disk thing again to be sure).

EDIT: Also, if your external is not formatted with the osx & GUID options you will need to re-format it (CCC will tell you if your clone will be bootable or not)