OWC SSD and Snow Leopard Install.

[nathanielonfire]

Hi everyone,

I have a question. I have an OWC SSD (Mercury Extreme Pro 115 GB) and a 13" 2011 MacBook Pro 2.7 Ghz. I bought this SSD because I haven't found that people online were having much trouble with it in their macs. The problem is that Snow Leopard installs have failed each of the 5-6 times I've tried. I either get a kernel panic, hanging at around the 28 minutes remaining mark (about 2/3 of progress bar), or complete freezing (progress bar stops animating and mouse stops responding).

I've talked to OWC several times and they suggested formatting the whole drive for free space as Master Boot Record and then creating the partition. No dice.

I'm now running Memtest86 to check my RAM (as I also installed 8 GB at the same time as the SSD) thinking that may be a problem. It's about 50% done at the time of this writing.

I may try zeroing the drive or resetting the PRAM, but honestly, I'm stumped. I also have a Crucial C300 SSD that I was hesitant to try because of all the posts I've read about SATA III drives not working well...but at this point, that may be preferred. At least it may actually install.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks.

 

[jimbo1mcm]

Suggestion

Leave the 8gb Ram in and put your old hard drive back in and see if the RAM is working perfectly. If it is, then try the Crucial, then if that works, try the OWC.

 

[nathanielonfire]

Memtest86 did a full pass on the 8 GB of RAM and reported no errors.

OWC drive reported a kernel panic after zeroing and PRAM reset. I took it out and I think I'm going to try an RMA.

Installed the Crucial drive. Installation failed (regular error, not kernel panic) after initial try and after zeroing. I'm now trying with a 2 partition setup on the Crucial drive to see if that may work.

 

[MaxxTraxx]

Have the same problem and I'm using a regular hard drive. Thinking about trying a new install DVD.