02-27-2011, 10:13 PM

I was very lucky when I went to visit the family this year that I was able to convince my brother to trade his 15.4" i5 for my 13" core2duo. A HDD swap later and I was up and running.

Now I want the OS to fully use every hardware piece at its max potential so I want to do a OS Clean Install. However, when I try to boot from DVD I have no luck. I am using the MBP 2.4Ghz i5 with everything standard except a 640GB HDD. The OS discs I have tried are the one that came with the 15" mac, brand new retail copy of 10.6.3 SL, and a copy of 10.5 leopard.

I can read the discs when running the OS, but when i restart booting from disc (whether I use the 'option' key on startup or boot into the OS then load the DVD to restart) all I get is the light gray-off-white screen and the apple LOGO, no loading wheel or anything. Nothing ever loads even after 30 minutes. I thought maybe it would be my HDD so I swapped in another HDD and tried it, but no luck. I then tested my official HDD in another mac and that mac booted from disc just fine.

I then decided to remove the RAM and reinstall it, and also reset the PRAM, and yet nothing changes. I don't get any Kernal Panic errors or anything.

I am taking it to Apple tomorrow but has anyone gone through something like this or have any idea what could be going on?

02-27-2011, 10:43 PM

had this happen to me.

Your build date is too new for ANY of those discs to work (SL retail, 10.6.3, whatever).. are you 100% the discs he gave you were from that computer when he purchased it?

02-27-2011, 10:45 PM

Yah I am positive. It's just such a weird issue since my old mac desktop and macbook will read the discs fine. I will make sure and post tomorrow what Apple has to say about this little issue.

But yah if there is anything anyone can think of I would love to figure this out and not drive an hour to the Apple store.

02-27-2011, 10:52 PM

this caused me to visit two apple stores, an applecare phone tech session, and the only luck i had was the most awesome Genius giving me the restore discs from a returned (same exact spec) macbook pro (I had recently lost my discs).

Watch out.. apple sent me the wrong disc TWICE...

good luck.

02-28-2011, 02:39 PM

So I'm updating to archive this problem... The Apple store found that my original restore disks were bad (musta made some low quality batches) so I have to contact apple care to get replacements.

The other discs won't work because my bootloader is too new even for 10.6.3 snow leopard discs which I think is apples way of making sure people don't buy the $30 retail disc to use for restores. I hate this but that's business.

They did however offer to use their disc and do a clean install for free which I am now waiting to finish before I take it home so kudos there for customer service!

03-01-2011, 12:36 AM

yup, just as I had assumed