Chosen Solution
I installed a new hard drive in my MacBook, but cannot get Snow Leopard to install. I did the replacement according to ifixit.com and then partitioned it and ran erase. When I start up with the disk, everything seems to be going fine - the new HD shows as destination for install and the screen says it’s installing the OS. It says there are 30 minutes left and then an error screen comes up that says there’s a software problem and to retry. I’ve tried about ten times, same result. Do you have any idea what’s going on and how I can fix it so I can install the OS? I’ve even tried installing Tiger from an old disk, but nothing at all happened - just a blank screen. Please help!
Some optical drives are very touchy, especially with dual-layer DVDs like the Snow Leopard installer. I’d take a look at the underside of the DVD and see if there are any scratches or smudges…if there are smudges, clean them off with a damp soft cloth. In severe cases, the drive may just not be able to read the DVD, in which case you may need to obtain a DVD that is free of scratches, or use an external optical drive, or the drive of another Mac in target mode. Also, just curious, you mention you partitioned the drive…did you format the entire drive as a single volume? If you could detail the process and options you chose just so we can verify you didn’t pick anything non-standard, that would be good to rule out.
Do the optional install, and don’t install everything. I couldn’t get the default install to work with my iBook after upgrading the HD and memory. But, doing the custom install with its allowed turning off of extra items worked. (BTW, I also upgraded the DVD to be the iFixit RW DVD, Don’t know if that made any difference.).
i have a same problem in 1.83ghz one. i have a solution for this . just change the ram with new one . sure it will install try . how many ram you have install in your system try to remove one and install if fails then try with another one . it will solve surely . thnx
hard drive fail to format on mac
