Problems installing Snow Leopard on brand new Intel 320 120GB SSD

[gnasher729]

The Disk Utility recognized my SSD perfectly, I erased (with zero out data) ...

Which is about the daftest thing you can do. Your SSD has now been 100% used, so if you have a good drive with garbage collection that garbage collection will have to work overtime, if you have a less good drive that slows down with usage you have just produced the worst case usage pattern.

 

[bozz2006]

That's a pretty frustrating experience... I'd be pulling my hair out. How about troubleshooting the SSD by installing the HDD you just removed. Boot the install disk and use disk utility to erase the drive. Then try to install SL on that HDD and see how that goes.

 

[gguerini]

That's a pretty frustrating experience... I'd be pulling my hair out. How about troubleshooting the SSD by installing the HDD you just removed. Boot the install disk and use disk utility to erase the drive. Then try to install SL on that HDD and see how that goes.

This is what I'm going to do tonight. Try to install SL on my original HDD and, if it works, try to clone and transfer to the new SSD.

I still need to find a good tool to test my SSD. Anyone?

 

[bozz2006]

If it were me and you're able to install the OS on the old HDD, I would be taking that SSD back for an exchange. If the problem really is the SSD, I can't imagine it will just stop giving you problems. Not worth the hassle.

 

[gguerini]

So guys.. I put the stock HDD back to my MacBook Pro to install Snow Leopard and the same thing happened! Yellow exclamation mark and the message says the installation couldn't copy the necessary files. Which means.. it's very unlikely that the SSD is a faulty unit.

I'm trying again with a different DVD media and driver. It's going.. but super slowly. Super super!

The funny thing is I installed Snow Leopard on my computer few weeks ago and it worked great. I don't know why I can't install it again.

Have you ever seen it before?

Thanks again.

 

[Detrius]

So guys.. I put the stock HDD back to my MacBook Pro to install Snow Leopard and the same thing happened! Yellow exclamation mark and the message says the installation couldn't copy the necessary files. Which means.. it's very unlikely that the SSD is a faulty unit.

I'm trying again with a different DVD media and driver. It's going.. but super slowly. Super super!

The funny thing is I installed Snow Leopard on my computer few weeks ago and it worked great. I don't know why I can't install it again.

Have you ever seen it before?

Thanks again.

Yes, with a bad optical drive. You've tried two different discs, so that implies it's not likely the discs. You've tried two different "hard" drives, so it's not likely the drive. Supposedly, one of your sticks of RAM failed memtest, so you do have a bad stick of RAM. What's next is the optical drive. You said earlier something about a disc image, so if you do have a good disc image, you can image that to the back 8GB of one of your drives, then boot from that and run the installer. You'll have bypassed a possible bad optical drive.

 

[gguerini]

Yes, with a bad optical drive. You've tried two different discs, so that implies it's not likely the discs. You've tried two different "hard" drives, so it's not likely the drive. Supposedly, one of your sticks of RAM failed memtest, so you do have a bad stick of RAM. What's next is the optical drive. You said earlier something about a disc image, so if you do have a good disc image, you can image that to the back 8GB of one of your drives, then boot from that and run the installer. You'll have bypassed a possible bad optical drive.

Hello Detrius,

It's very likely to be my DVD drive and the new memory stick. Back to last week, when I tried to install SL on my SSD, it was taking soooo long that I cancelled the installation. Then using an external DVD drive, it worked. Last night I installed SL from a FireWire external HD and it took at the most 25 min to complete the installation.

Now my MacBook Pro seems to be very stable. I will keep it on and running during the day to see if it crashes again. If it doesn't the problem will be solved and I will try to fix my DVD drive. I'm still under warranty.

Well guys, thank you all for the support.