Wow, what a long day. Still battling the MacBook Air. OS X Disk Utility changed it mind concerning the hard drive's S.M.A.R.T. status from "Pending failure" to "Verified". I had to go find a trial version of a Mac disk utility that would more accurately report the S.M.A.R.T. status. I just now found SMARTReporter also, which is a free utility that periodically polls the status of the drive and reports on its health. It is ALWAYS better to know ahead of time when things are about to go south! Anyway, got an 80GB ZIF drive on the way so we can get it back on its feet. Very rare drive now, very tough to find.
We've been working on a MacBook 13.3" A1181 that was brought in with some mysterious ailment. We've got retail install disks for Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard and also original install media for Leopard for the MacBook. Various attempts to get something to install using the superdrive kept resulting in kernel panics and an instruction to power off the computer. Some of the media would take and would get just past the language selection window but would then report that "Mac OS X cannot be installed on this computer". Research into this took me down several roads. I won't report all the options, but they include checking for the proper partition format on the drive, creating new install media that has been somewhat modified to ensure it will accept the particular Mac you're trying to install it on, and connecting the computer to another Mac as a firewire target drive and installing it that way.
I checked the partition and it looked fine and was formatted as GUID, which is required for the Intel Based Macs. What I did notice when looking at the "Info" window was that the partition was "Partition 2" and contained 3 folders and 3 files, despite the fact that I had just erased it and told it to create a single partition. If you look at the partition tab in Disk Utility, you'll notice the "+" and "-" below the graphical representation of the partitions. I clicked on the "-" and applied that, which deleted the existing partition and left no volume whatsoever. I then recreated a single partition. This time, the partition was numbered "Partition 0". After doing this, I tried the OS 10.6 retail install media, which finally took. Yay!!! so, 30 minutes late, the MacBook rebooted and I was back to square on - kernel panic, need to power off. So depressing.
More research into kernel panics revealed that memory can often be the cause. Who would think? It ran find to install the OS and crashed during the reboot. It would seem that the memory was fine. So, I took out the memory anyway and found a white paste on the contacts of both bars (maybe it was supposed to be there) and I cleaned it off. Put one bar back in and restarted and voila, it continued the initial setup from the hard drive finally! It is now downloading the 1GB update for OS X.
I did try the firewire target method for installing the OS. It seemed to work great and even restarted and ran through the initialization of the OS, all through the other Mac. Very interesting. Shut it down, restarted it on its own, and kernel panic!
I also used SuperDuper! to create an exact copy (clone) of the functioning MacBook's drive onto the problem drive. When installed into the customer's Mac, nothing but grey showed up on the screen during the bootup. Tried the drive in my MacBook and it worked fine. Very frustrating. Maybe always associated with the memory issue, maybe it had something to do with the partition showing up as #2.
Daryn
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