Macbook Snow Leopard Reinstall

Hi guys and girls,

Recently I tried to update my 13 Inch Macbook which I purchased in the early to mid 2010 period. I have been operating Snow Leopard OS X 10.6. It was just a standard update from the apple updater which promised the newest version of flash. Anyway this update toook AGES. Hours. Then when it restarted i got the dreaded white/gray screen with a flashing prohibitory sign. I tried rebooting a few times and this screen always came up. So I went here:

Mac OS X: Gray screen appears during startup

Where I tried the steps suggested:

Firstly - Disconnect, test peripheral devices and network cables

I had nothing to disconnect.

Secondly - Perform a Safe Boot

The Mac didn't start up as expected so...

Thirdly - Reset the NVRAM / PRAM

I did this and the gray screen issue persisted so....

Fouthly - Start from your Mac OS X Install disc; use Disk Utility

I did this and I managed to go to disk utility where I repaired the disk and the permissions. The permissions required repairs while the disk appeared to be ok. So then I restarted and it worked (granted it was extremely slow and boot up took like 10 + minutes) I managed to back up most of my files before continuing to use the computer for about two days. It often froze and needed rebooting. This was getting slower and slower till yesterday it needed rebooting and went back to the gray screen issue AGAIN. So i repeated step four by using the disk utility and repairing the disk. Again permissions had problems that it said it repaired. But after restarting from disk utility it went to a gray screen AGAIN on start up. Then i rebooted and it tried to boot up and it didn't go to a gray screen as such but it took so long to boot and it froze just as the desktop background loaded. So anyway I then rebooted and since then its been gray screens. So I decided to go to....

Fifthly - Remove third-party RAM and internal hardware

I had nothing to remove so I went onto...

Sixthly - Perform an Archive and Install installation of Mac OS X

Apparently Snow Leopard does this automatically so I didn't need to click any boxes or preferences when getting to the OS X installer that loads up when you boot from the disk. Unfortunately the first install was interupted because I thought I had made a mistake so I rebooted. Subsequently as I have tried to install/reinstall it always gets to about 30% of the installation (around 35 minutes remaining) before the progress bar of the installer goes BACK to approximately the 7% mark.... where it says it has like 42-44 minutes remaining..... It does this everytime. At which point the cd drive goes quiet and it sounds like its just not working. It seems to do this for hours with no change. It just stays on this mark.... Now i am using the Mac OS X install DVD i got with the Macbook so I should have no problems here right? I am not sure what to do? Can anyone help me reinstall this Macbook with the Snow Leopard operating system... and do I need to consider the dreaded Seventh Step???

Seventhly - Perform an Erase and Install installation of Mac OS X as a last resort


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

From your description it sounds obvious (to me, anyway) that the hard drive is failing. My suggestion would be replace the hard drive and restore from your TM backup or other backup.

By replace the hard drive do you mean replace the hardware itself? or do you mean i should do the 7th step and erase whats on the drive and reinstall everything?

Thanks for the reply btw

dko said:

By replace the hard drive do you mean replace the hardware itself? or do you mean i should do the 7th step and erase whats on the drive and reinstall everything?

Thanks for the reply btw

Click to expand...

No, he means replace the hardware itself. I'd agree with his assessment, although I would recommend running some diagnostics to check to make sure that it's legit.

The simplest way to do this is to use the SMART Utility to check SMART status:

Volitans Software- Makers of SMART Utility for the Mac

If any of the categories report in as "failed", then you have your answer.... time for a new drive.

Unfortunately, drive prices have skyrocketed lately due to flooding in Thailand. So, you may want to consider an SSD (much faster, and not subject to mechanical failure) as the price differential is starting to get way more reasonable in the wake of this disaster.

More info on SSDs available here:
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro Solid State Drive (SSD) Solutions - High Performance, Reliability, and Endurance