lstat1 Posted December 22, 2009 Share Posted December 22, 2009 We decided to take a trip to colorado for Christmas this year. On the way here i picked up my macbook pro. Im excited, i finally have the real thing. It had Ubuntu installed on it, the guy said the recovery disks were scratched and would not install. Anyway, i have the recovery cd for the 17" macbook pro. Is there anyway i can make this work? Mine is a 15" alluminum macbook (Not unibody) and the 17" is the early 2008 (Plastic model-i think it was 2008, maybe '07?) we got my dad the 17 for his bday this year. Well, i reformated the hard drive in my 15" and tried installing leopard. I got the error stating it could not be installed. I am 15 hours away from home and have no firewire cable so i cannot use target disk mode. Is there anyway to get the 17" disk to work? Ive read target disk mode will work by mounting the 15" as a "external drive", but as i said, i have no firewire cables with me. I do have a USB Data transfer cable. Could i use this in anyway to mount my pro with the 17"? I really need this to work! I do not have a retail disk either, all i have is the recovery. Please help! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/203381-install-leopard/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moose Tracks Posted December 22, 2009 Share Posted December 22, 2009 It's $30 for the generic Snowy Leopard disk. OR...you can just try swapping out the drives. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/203381-install-leopard/#findComment-1366336 Share on other sites More sharing options...
lstat1 Posted December 22, 2009 Author Share Posted December 22, 2009 Ok, so i have an 8gig micro sdhc card and a usb card reader. Ta da! I did a basic install. I popped the card reader into the 17 and dropped the cd in. Like i said BASIC install. i deselected everything - printer, languages, etc. The card had 29 megs left of space. Anyway, i connected it to mine and popped the cd into it. The error came up and i hit ok. Went to disk manager, re-wiped my hard drive and use the recovery to transfer everything on the sd card to the hard drive. Yay! It worked, im on my macbook pro as we speak, now, i have a lot of problems. The keyboard backlight is not working (Where is the light sensor on this model? Isnt it in the speakers? I cover them and get nothing..), My airport does not seem to be working either. The 17" is currently connected to the resorts wifi, but mine wont even detect it when it is searching, thankfully there is wired. So, the 17" pro and the HP we have are both able to connect. My HTC Dream connects, moms iPhone, my sisters iTouch etc. But my pro wont. Anyone have a fix for this? I thought all OSX disks had basically a universal build even if it wasnt the right recovery disk, it has the same build of leo. Im on 10.5.4, also, my trackpad isnt working. It works, and my two finger scrolling is working, but i have no right click. This is very frustrating.... I was wrong, my mistake. I had to enable right click, i thought it was enabled by default. My other problems are still present. The backlight is checked under the keyboard but its not working. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/203381-install-leopard/#findComment-1366424 Share on other sites More sharing options...
lstat1 Posted December 23, 2009 Author Share Posted December 23, 2009 Ok, i bought snow leopard tonight, the fam. pack for five installs. I got back to the resort, popped it into my macbook pro and was off, booting was fine. I wiped my drive and started the instal. It sat at "29 minutes remaining" for almost 10 minutes. It then came up and said "there was an error installing mac OSX" confused, i rebooted. I went through the partition option and partitioned it to GUID. I figure ill just try the "erase" tab this time. I booted up and it spits the disk out. I boot up again holding option and again, it spits out the disk. I did this probably ten times or more. I popped the disk into my dads 17" and it booted fine. I put it back in mine now its booting. Please help!! Ok, so far so good. I erased my hard drive again and now the installer jumped to 28min. left and the progress bar is filling up. Ill be crossing my fingers! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/203381-install-leopard/#findComment-1367007 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chienly09 Posted December 28, 2009 Share Posted December 28, 2009 The Leopard installer has probably corrupted your installed OS, by deleting or overwriting new files. So you need to install either Leopard again, or your old OS version. Is the Leopard disk a retail copy? These are black disks and will work on any Mac. Grey disks come in the box with the computer, and only work with those particular Macs. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/203381-install-leopard/#findComment-1370837 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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