Please help me get pass the "already own a Mac?" loop?

[JustinAiken]

After my hard drive containing my OSes, as well as their backups, decided to die, I thought it would be a good time to move to Snow Leopard... but it's been a nightmare!!

 

I've followed the UD4P guide in this forum, and every time it gets to the place where it asks if you have a Mac you want to transfer things from, when I click continue it gives me the spinning beach ball of death

 

I've tried with and without a GFX string, installing to the EFI partion, installing to the main partition, putting most of the kexts in /S/L/E, putting most of the kexts in /Extra, booting with all kinds of flags (cpus=1 -v -x), rebuilding the cache, deleteting the Extensions.mkext in Extra and loading just the kexts, lower graphic modes, and some other things I can't even remember now...

 

No matter what, I still get the spinning beach ball of death, at the same place.

 

I've also tried touching the /var/db/.AppleSetupDone file, but that doesn't work, as it won't let me set a root password - when I do "passwd root" after the fsck and mounting stuff, it tells me "eDsRecordNotFound"

 

When looking at the startup things, I do see errors about the realtek ethernet not being loaded, the appleHDA not being loaded, and firewire defaulting to full-secure...

 

Can anybody please help me boot into a fresh SL install?

[JustinAiken]

Got it!!! Two different guides involved moving different kexts between /S/L/E and /Extra... neither guide worked for me, but when I tried just installing the kexts where digitaldreamer's script put them by default it worked!

 

I can't get my Ethernet to work now, but at least I got it booting, and sound and video seem to be working fine.