MacBook will not boot OS X

A

awball

Registered
Hello all,

Recently the drive in my macbook bit the dust. I have installed a replacement hard drive but when I insert the factory os disk (10.4 I think?) and attempt to boot from it (holding "c" to boot from disc or "option" for a list) the system does not find a bootable disk and displays the question mark folder. The laptop boots a windows xp cdrom, vista dvd, and linux cdrom/livecd without fail, but it never recognizes the os x installation disc. I had upgraded to Leopard but I lost those disks somehow. In frustration I bought a retail copy of snow leopard hoping there was an unseen problem with the factory disk, but the same story happens. Next I installed the "Remote install" software from the snow leopard disk on another computer on my LAN and attempted to network boot + install but no luck here either. I called Apple tech support and learned my 2 year extended warranty had expired just 2 weeks ago, they were unwilling to even give direction without paying more money.

I should point out both windows and linux can see the new hard disk and install to it, so it seems to be working fine in the system. I have booted with command+option+p+r too and successfully cleared pram. At first I thought the super drive may be bad but when the network boot option failed I was really thrown for a loop. Does anybody have any tips or ideas to get things going again without shelling out even more cash?
 
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I tried booting with my new hard disk pulled out of the system but the same thing happened, it ejects the mac os x discs after it reads them for a minute or so. I had done some research and found that upgrading to Leopard in most cases makes it impossible to install an earlier version? i could see not being able to roll back an existing installation but the way some folks talked about it, it seems that it upgrades something that prevents you from booting anything earlier. I also learned that Snow Leopard is an upgrade to Leopard, and as such will not boot and install on its own. I'm not getting any error message whatsoever, but does anyone think it'd be worth the effort to get a copy of Leopard and try to install it first?
 
There is something going on with your optical drive. The Snow Leopard disks aren't upgrades, they are full installers. You just have a flaky optical drive. Try cleaning the disk(s) with some Isopropyl alcohol and a lint free cloth just to make sure its not the disk(s).
 
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