Cannot Allocate Memory Error
I am bringing this over from another post on how the MacBook Pro broke down and how this error seems to befuddle anyone who is asked what exactly it means.
Monday night I used my Macbook Pro as usual without incident and closed the lid and it went to sleep. Tuesday I did what I had to do all day with the MacBook and everything was working fine, no issues whatsoever. I closed the lid again when i finished what I had to do and left it alone. Later that evening I went back to use the laptop, opened up the shell and it woke up as normal. I launched firefox and then the spinning wheel kept going and going and then stopped spinning all together, total freeze job.
After a forced shutdown and reboot the laptop white screened for about 3 minutes then when into the apple icon screen with the spinning wheel. I left it alone and after an hour, the wheel was still spinning and the laptop had not booted.
I rebooted this time with the installation CD - Snow Leopard - and booted through the CD drive. When the installation screen came up I went to the disk utility app and looked at the hard drive. The utility could see the hard drive but could not mount it. Figuring the drive/install went bad somewhere along the line (keep in mind that I had been using the laptop for 3 months since purchase without incident. I purchased it at BestBuy, open box item that I have come to find out was a trade-in of some sort because it was previously owned - mid 2009 13 inch macbook pro) I decided to go ahead and reformat since everything is always backed up.
DU was able to erase the partition, but when I went to create a new one, it gave me the "Cannot Allocate Memory" failure notice. I tried a couple more times, reboot, tried again, nothing doing. I then pulled the drive out of the macbook and connected it to another machine. I was able to create the partition using another mac and then reinstalled the drive into the macbook. when I went to install, it got half way done and then game me an error that prevented it from finishing the install.
Just to cover all bases, I purchased another hard drive and installed it with the same error message. Finally I took it in to the genius bar where the "genius" was perplexed by the error and went on the try and convince me that the drive was bad.
I can deduce a few things.
1. Same failure occurred on two different drives
2. When mac genius connected firewire 800 drive, it was not read by the macbook
3. I was able to access and format drive on another mac
4. Therefore, the drives are good and something else is going on.
It is in the shop now and don't know much about mac architecture - I am quite proficient at PC having created a few of my own systems - so I don't know if this is a product of bad drivers on the mother/logic board etc. If so, I know that there are ways to tweak these settings in PCs by accessing the BIOS, but I have read that it is not possible, at least for a laymen like myself, to do such things on a mac.
A few other notes before I get to the question. during the network boot and diagnostic that the genius performed on the mac, it passed all of the tests. It is with the techs now and I don't know what they are going to find.
