Can't boot to replaced HD in MBPro

TheSketch · #1 June 17th, 2009, 03:34 PM

I suspect there's info here somewhere on my issue, but I'm having a hard time finding something specific to my issue.

I have a late 2008 unibody Macbook Pro that I wanted to upgrade the hard drive on. A Seagate 500gb SATA 7200rpm (16mb cache) seems to have worked for other people so I picked one up. The installation is no problem and I thought I would load the OS from my Leopard disk and use the migration assistant to copy my apps and what have you over. You would think this is no problem.

Now when I got the disk, I partitioned it into two partitions, one 300gb and one 180± (whatever the balance is) using the journaled HFS+ filesystem and the GUID partition schema since this is an intel machine and obviously I want it bootable.

When I go to install the OS from Leopard I find I can't boot from the DVD – the system just reboots before even getting the apple logo. So I use an older gen MBP and boot my MacBook Pro into target mode and install the OS from there. Seems to go without a hitch and I can see the basic directory structure from the other machine but when I go to boot the machine up directly it simply reboots itself repeatedly like before. Inexplicable as far as I can tell.

So when I have the new hard drive in the machine with (apparently) the OS loaded I can pull up the bootable options with the option key at boot though the machine reboots repeatedly, and I can go into target mode. I can't get into single user mode and verbose mode moves through some text before it reboots though I can't quite record it and reboots very quickly. It looks like it gets to a reference about /System/Library/kexts or something such.

I should have the disk formatted correctly for an intel machine but it just won't boot. I've reset the NVRAM (or what have you) and the PMU but nothing there. There are no jumpers on the HD but that shouldn't matter – right?

I think I've done everything correctly, and the disk behaves perfectly normally when mounted in target mode or in an enclosure. I'm pretty sure I'm missing something obvious but critical. Any thoughts?

djackmac · #2 June 17th, 2009, 05:50 PM

Those unibody macbook pros are really finicky about installers. Going target disk mode install through the older MBP will obviously cause problems doing it that way because it seems you were trying to force a version of 10.5 the machine did not like, the reason it wouldn't install in the first place. Are these 10.5 installers the ones that came with this machine? If not you are probably going to need the retail version 10.5.4 or later. I would actually say 10.5.6 to be safe.

ElDiabloConCaca · #3 June 17th, 2009, 05:55 PM

Quote:

...I thought I would load the OS from my Leopard disk...

Is this a retail Leopard installer disk, or the Software Restore disk that shipped with the late-2008 MacBook Pro?

You should be using the gray-colored Software Restore disk that came with the computer. Typically, you cannot load an operating system on a Mac that is earlier than the operating system that shipped with the computer. For example, if your retail Leopard disk is version 10.5.1 but your MacBook Pro shipped with 10.5.4, then you will not be able to use the retail disk to reload OS X.

Edit: Just realized I repeated a lot of things djackmac said... sorry!

TheSketch · #4 June 19th, 2009, 01:59 AM

That explains it. I thought I was missing something obvious and once I find the disks (they're here somewhere) I'll try it that way. I knew you couldn't install, say, Tiger onto a machine that shipped with Leopard, and there's no reason to expect the point releases to be any different. Makes perfect sense.

On that note, if I can't find them, I should be able to clone my original HD onto my new disk (in an enclosure) and install it there, correct?

Thanks for your help with this. Once I make the leap I'll be sure to note it in the thread.