Cannot install Snow Leopard

I am trying to install Snow Leopard on daughter's MacBook which is currently running Leopard. I install the disk and get "Mac OS X 10.6 cannot be installed on this computer". There are 2G RAM available. Any suggestions?

You can't use a disk which came with another Mac model to upgrade.
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Cannot install snow leopard. Keep getting"os product manager domain error-100"

Cannot install snow leopard. Keep getting"os product manager domain error-100"

Just to double check,
1: you are hold c or option/alt key booted from the 10.6 disk that came with your machine
2: you are in Disk Utility and you have selected the drive makers name and disk size on the left
3: you attempt to click Partition tab, click on the big box, select 1 partition, select option: GUID and format OS X exteneded Journaled and it reports "can't unmount disk"
4: you do have no other drives connected to the machine
If that's all true, then you need to quit Disk Utility and use Terminal and try to force unmount the disk
http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/309784-official-mac-os-x-1 0-6-snow-leopard-thread-faq-33.html
Once the drive is unmounted, then hopefully you should be able to format it in Disk Utility

Cannot install Snow Leopard on Late 2006 iMac with 10.5.8

I tried already two times to update my iMac (currently on OS X Leopard 10.5.8) to Snow Leopard. The update process runs for about 20 minutes. The iMac restarts, and then there's a message that Snow Leopard cannot be installed. One shall contact the software's manufacturer. I checked in the Installer log file and it says something like it could not u(n)mount a volume.
There are 2 external hard drives connected to the iMac via FireWire (one for TimeMachine). Do I have to disconnect them before installing? There's also a TV tuner (DVB-S) from Terratec connected via USB and EyeTV (a version compatible to Snow Leopard) is installed. I already thought that it is maybe the EyeTV software (that came with the Terratec tuner) that prevents the installer from proceeding ...
As stated, I gave it two tries:
The first time I booted the iMac from an external hard drive with 10.5.8 installed on it, ran disk utility to check, repair permissions and verify the iMac's internal disk (--> everything was fine) and then inserted the Snow Leopard DVD and launched the installer.
The second time I booted the iMac from its internal hard disk (with 10.5.8) (=the disk on which I wanted to install Snow Leopard), inserted the DVD and launched the installer.
No success in both cases.
Any suggestions, help ??
Thanks a lot in advance!
Rainer

I think it will work if you restart from the Snow Leopard installation disc. Insert disc. Restart with the C key held down to force startup from the optical drive. You have already done a +Repair Disk+, which is a smart move before doing any system installation. So when Installer comes up, just proceed with the installation targeting your internal drive.

Cannot install Snow Leopard over 10.5.8 because "can't boot from" boot disk

I closed all my apps.
I ran the installer.
I agreed the terms.
I am ask where to install Snow Leopard.
Only one disk is available - my boot disk.
It has a yellow triangle on it.
Selecting the disk tells me "Mac OS X cannot be installed on "Macintosh HD", because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer.".
Rebooting and attempting an install direct from CD yields the same results.
My machine is a six month old aluminium MacBook, and the only difference between it in the shop and today is that it has a customer-installed 500GB hard drive and ditto 4GB RAM in it.
Help.
Neil.

Hi Mike,
Sorry you're having the same problem. It's very frustrating! I'm making some noise about it because as a consequence of being in the software biz for years, I keep machines as vanilla and default as possible whilst serving my purposes as best I can - so I hopefully tread a very well worn QA path. That I am suffering problems probably means a great many more are doing the same.
Unfortunately your solution isn't a good one for me - I simply don't have 400GB of space anywhere nearby. I do have Time Machine backup to a Time Capsule so maybe a solution is to do a vanilla install and clean disk and then a restore. I don't fancy this much though.
I can't help feeling that this is a simple defect in the installer disk detection though, that it uses some custom code rather than systemwide routine to detect bootability.
Neil.

Cannot install Snow Leopard on a new HD in MacBook

I have an older white MacBook that I want to install Snow Leopard onto again. I swapped the existing harddrive back to the original one I received from Apple when the MacBook was purchased. Before putting the hd into the MacBook I made sure to partition and format with Mac Journaled.
During startup I put the Snow Leopard disc and press C to boot from disc. Slowly but eventually, the Snow Leopard process begins. My MacBook cannot seem to detect the HD that is in the machine... When I run Disk Utility, it does not populate but the DVD drive with the Snow Leopard disc is found.
Any suggestions?

What you are saying boils down to the MacBook is not recognizing the HD now installed in it. (Regardless of the formatting, Disk Utility should at least list the drive if it is communicating with the MB's hardware.)
Open the MB & make sure the HD is installed correctly, if necessary by removing it & reseating it, making sure connectors are fully mated, nothing is interfering with its fit into the space for it, etc. Close everything up & restart it, listening for any sounds that indicate the HD is spinning up. If not, it may have been damaged. You can also run the Apple Hardware Test from your original grey system disc set (see the label of the disc for instructions about how to do that if necessary) & see if it detects any hardware problems. If so, make a note of the error code & report that.

Cannot install Snow Leopard, Icon just bounces and disappears

So so complicated to Use a Mac, absolutely the opposite of user friendly after coming from a PC: everything is hidden on Macs!
So I want to install Snow Leopard (I currently run Leopard - got the computer 2nd hand)
I have a new copy of Snow Leopard in a box with the leopard on the front.
The Adobe user guide opens fine from the disc itself so the disc works.
I double click on the install Mac os x with the blue arrow pointing down at the top.
IT bounces 3 or 4 times in the bar at the bottom. Then nothing else happens
Don't understand this. It won't even tell me what's going wrong.
Machine Model: Mac mini
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (1.2)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1.42 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.8.9f1
Thanks for any help

You need a Intel machine

Cannot install snow leopard in macbook pro early 2011. disk is rejected. what do I do?

Unable to install snow leopard in macbook pro early 2011. When I put in the disk, the computer does not accept it. What can I do?

lord1908,
some Early 2011 MacBook Pros originally came with Snow Leopard installed, and some originally came with Lion installed. If yours originally came with Snow Leopard installed, then you should be able to install Snow Leopard from its model-specific grey Mac OS X Install DVD. (The white retail Snow Leopard DVD can’t be used with it; it was made for use with earlier models, which originally came with either Tiger or Leopard installed.) If yours originally came with Lion installed, then it won’t accept any Snow Leopard DVD; instead, you’d be able to use OS X Internet Recovery to download and install its original version of Lion from Apple’s servers.

Cannot Install Snow Leopard on Macbook Pro 7,1

Hello guys,
I've recently bought a USED Macbook Pro, which has installed Mac O SX Lion (10.7)
The thing is I need to install Snow Leopard and I can't do it. I have tried by simply clickin on the Installer Icon and also by booting pressing the key "Option" but when I do this the system asks me to restart my Macbook.
The DVD I'm using a Original Copy of Snow Leopard 10.6
Any ideas? Please! Help me!
my Macbook Pro:
Macbook Pro 7,1
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4
4 GB Ram DDR3
HD 250 GB Hitachi HTS545025B9SA02

You need the SL discs that came with the coputer. The original SL DVD you have is probably too old to support the hardware on your Mac.

Cannot install Snow Leopard on late 2006 MacBook

I have been trying to perform an erase and reinstall of this machine for my daughter to use. The ram had been upgraded to 2GB, and my son had it partitioned to run Windows also. There was never any problem with the machine -- I just bought him a new MacBook Pro last year.
So - I have successfully performed the "erase" part - but Snow Leopard (from retail discs - that this machine had been upgraded to) will not complete installation. I have gotten as far as "28 minutes remaining" and then it hangs up - spinning beachball - etc.. I hear the drive start up, and then stop, over and over.
I booted from the disc and ran the Disk Utility - and it shows that the hard drive is working properly.
And of course Apple says that they do not support machines over 5 years old (something to that effect).
Any help anyone can provide is greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Kim

kiminfl wrote:
Ok - so I am back into Disk Utility (booted from disk and selected disk utility). There are 2 hard drive icons on the left hand side ' 60.01 GB Toshiba, and then below it (indented) "Untitled".
The 60GB Toshiba is your entire boot hard drive, the "Untitled" below it is a partition on that drive if it's indented or else it's the optical drive.
What you want to do is select the "60GB toshiba" and click Erase, then Security Option > Zero All Data and click Erase, this will map off any bad sectors that old drive might have. Will take some time so wait about a hour.
(Ideally it would be good to replace it with a newer/larger one)
Install/upgrade RAM or storage drive in Mac's
Once that is complete you head to Partition: Select 1 Option: GUID and Format: OS X Extended Journaled, give the drive a name and click "Apply"
Now your drive is formatted, quit Disk Uitlity and select the drive and install OS X 10.6.
Once it's completed reboot and setup, enter your wifi/network and get online and Apple menu Software update until clear.
The machine is ready to use.
How to erase and install Snow Leopard 10.6
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

Cannot install Snow Leopard onto external drive

I'm attempting to install Snow Leopard on a second drive, an external bare drive in an Icy Dock enclosure connected to a MacPro (running 10.6.6) via serial port. Apple Disc Utility confirms that the external drive (a Seagate 325gb) has a partition map scheme GUID Partition Table. SMART Status is not supported. Connection Bus reads as SCSI but it's connected with a serial cable.
I'm able to perform the first part of the install by selecting the external drive but when I have to restart and complete the install from the original Snow Leopard disc (10.6), the external drive no longer shows up. I've tried several times and have restarted the Icy Dock external drive enclosure.
Any ideas? Thank you.

Not necessarily. Use a backup utility so that you can deselect all the data from within your Home folder as well as third-party applications in order to create a bootable disk but without some of the excess. Any of the following should be suitable:
Backup Software Recommendations
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
Silver Keeper
MimMac
Retrospect
Super Flexible File Synchronizer
SuperDuper!
Synchronize Pro! X
Synk Pro
Synk Standard
Tri-Backup
Others may be found at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
Message was edited by: Kappy

Cannot Install Snow Leopard 10.6 disc on Macbook Pro (will not boot disc)

Hi there,
I have a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM. It is currently running Mac osX 10.4.11.
I am trying to install a snow leopard disc 10.6 but when I click on the disc and hit install, it restarts the computer and tries to start it up with the install disc. This is where I get an apple logo with a spinning progress wheel that doesn't go away until I force the laptop to power down.
Can anyone tell me how I can resolve this issue?
Thank,
Caleb

Double check to make sure your computer meets all the qualifications for the Snow Leopard upgrade. Especially check out the "Upgrading from Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger" section in the right column - http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html
Your disc may be damaged. You can always take your computer and the disc back to the Apple Store. See if they can boot.
Message was edited by: CMCSK

Cannot install snow leopard from disk?

Hello.
I have an original snow leopard disk.
I want to do a clean install on my imac also running sl.
So i start up holding c. The disk intially starts but then spin down with the apple logo. I left it this way for 15 minutes and nothing.
In my macbook, it loads straight up as expected.
The drive on the imac seems fine, i burnt an entire dvd with it this morning, and from the desktop the sl disk loads fine.
So what could it be?

If the original Snow Leopard disc you have is the original for another computer it will not work. The discs that come with a computer are machine specific. However if you have an upgrade Snow Leopard DVD that should work OK.
You mention needing to partitioning a Mac's HD is totally unnessary. Can you elaborate on why you need to partition it?

Unable to re-install Snow Leopard after upgrading to Mavericks

I upgraded to Mavericks before realizing that my USB microphone interface would no longer work with Mavericks due to the manufacturer not updating drivers... So I need to revert back to Snow Leopard. I don't have a time machine backup from snow leopard, so I erased my hard drive and attempted to re-install snow leopard from the installation CD's. But it won't work! It says that I cannot install Snow Leopard on my machine, only restore from a time machine backup.
I suspect mavericks messed with my firmware or something... How can I get the computer back to the way it was when I first bought it? It seems like you should always be able to revert to the OS that shipped with the machine, but this is proving very frustrating!

installation CD's
Is this a Snow Leopard DVD or the disks that came with your computer?

Install Snow Leopard on External FW Drive

Snow Leopard will only install on a GUID partition. I usually have two or three separate volumes on my external drive. If I partition my drive prior to Snow Leopard installation, the scheme is Apple partition map and I cannot install Snow Leopard on any volume. So I assume in order to do an install of Leopard, I must install to a single GUID partition because it seems there is no option to make any of the volumes a GUID partition. Am I correct? On this particular drive, I wanted to have a bootable clone
of my MacBook Pro HD, a bootable disk image of my Snow Leopard Install Disk, and a third scratch volume for temporary video storage. What would be my strategy be to accomplish this?

Tom Dignam wrote:
Snow Leopard will only install on a GUID partition. I usually have two or three separate volumes on my external drive. If I partition my drive prior to Snow Leopard installation, the scheme is Apple partition map and I cannot install Snow Leopard on any volume. So I assume in order to do an install of Leopard, I must install to a single GUID partition because it seems there is no option to make any of the volumes a GUID partition. Am I correct?
no you can have any number of volumes on a GUID partitioned drive.
select the whole drive (model, not name) in disk utility. click on the partition tab. set the number of partitions to 3 (or whatever), click on options and select GUID. set the formats for each partition, adjust the relative sizes and hit "apply".
On this particular drive, I wanted to have a bootable clone
of my MacBook Pro HD, a bootable disk image of my Snow Leopard Install Disk, and a third scratch volume for temporary video storage. What would be my strategy be to accomplish this?
this will work just fine once you reformat the drive as above.

Why can't I erase my hard disk or install Snow Leopard?

I have a 2010 imac Intel Core i3 running OS X. The computer has been running really slow lately, presumably because the hard drive was nearly full. I backed up and deleted most of my data on an external hard drive.
I would like to reformat, but I haven't been able to. When I use disk utility, the option to erase the hard drive is not available (it is in grey). When I try to install Snow Leopard from the desktop using the DVD, it says "Cannot install Snow Leopard on this computer." When I boot from the Snow Leopard disk holding C upon startup, it gives me the same message.
This may not be related, but I lost the Install DVD that came with the computer. I downloaded an ISO for Snow Leopard and burned it on to a disk. There don't seem to be any problems with this disk, though.
I appreciate any help that anyone can offer.
-Tom

I downloaded an ISO for Snow Leopard and burned it on to a disk.
I would not trust this disk to work, even if your Mac seems to be able to read it. There has never been an official, downloadable version of Snow Leopard. I suspect the ISO image lacks something necessary to OS X, causing it to fail when you run it. Someone other than Apple created that download and it's a pirated copy of OS X. (sorry to have to say that, but it is.)
My suggestion is to buy a legitimate copy of Snow Leopard on eBay or from Apple or an Apple reseller. Snow Leopard is still available from Apple ($19.99 USD).
The 2010 i3 iMacs came with 10.6.3 pre-installed. Generally speaking you cannot install a version of OS X that is earlier than what was factory pre-installed on the Mac. The OS X installer checks for this. The version of Snow Leopard delivered on the retail packages varied over time as updates were released, but at this time a new Snow Leopard package is most likely to be 10.6.8.
One final thing you might try - install CarbonCopyCloner and clone your hard drive to an external hard drive. Once the clone is complete, boot from the external hard drive. If everything works fine from the external drive you can use it to erase/reformat the internal drive in the iMac and then reverse clone your system back from the external drive. IMPORTANT NOTE: As far as I know, using CCC to "self-clone" the drive you are booted from will work, but I have never done it this way myself. I have always booted from an external drive that already had OS X installed on it so that the source drive I was cloning was NOT the same drive I was booted from at the time. It may work or not, but there is no harm in trying.

Cannot install Snow Leopard

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