Install Snow leopard with USB after new hard disk

[cpat88]

Hello,

I had to have my hard drive replaced in my macbook but I'm having difficulty installing mac osx from USB stick.

When I startup the computer, I hit the options key. The USB icon saying "Mac OSX installation DVD" appears and I click on it. The apple logo appears but then a "no entry" sign replaces it around a minute later.

This installation method had previously worked on the now-broken disk drive and I used TransMac to ensure that the USB was formatted to Mac standards.

Do I need to format the drive before I can install the software? If so, how would I go about this?

Many thanks!

 

[Satcomer]

Follow the steps in the blog How to Perform a Clean Install of Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 but don't pay attention to the DVD/CD part since you are using the USB 10.6 version. Just pay attention to the "Using Disk Utility from the Snow Leopard Installer" part. Using the installer's Disk Utiltiy foirst to fomat the drive Mac OS Extened.

 

[cpat88]

Thanks for your reply.

The problem is I don't have any mac software running on the macbook, I'm using windows xp right now which installed ok. I can't even get the language screen to appear, only this "no entry" sign with a white background.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

What kind of Mac OS X Install CD/DVD did you create the USB drive from? Was it a retail version, or was it a version that came along with the computer -- or, perhaps, a different computer?

 

[cpat88]

What kind of Mac OS X Install CD/DVD did you create the USB drive from? Was it a retail version, or was it a version that came along with the computer -- or, perhaps, a different computer?

Disk came with the computer. Backed it up onto USB but now the disk is lost.

Also another thing I was wondering: is running xp on a macbook machine stable enough? i.e. is xp on a mac more likely to fail (e.g. hard drive) than mac osx on a mac? Just curious.