New Unibody MBP won't boot from DVD or external drive, just loops

Question

Hey
We bought a new Unibody MBP on Monday, and loaned it to our CTO for a presentation. Having got it back from him now I wanted to nuke the installation and put a fresh copy of leopard on it, so I dropped the DVD in the drive, powered down, and booted holding the "C" key.
I get the chime, screen lights up, thinks for a bit, and if you use your imagination you can almost hear the DVD spin up. Then the screen goes black, lights up, chime, thinks a bit, goes black, lights up, chime and so on
I've tried booting from an external bootable clone I created with CCC (firewire external HDD), and same symptoms.
I even tried swapping in a hard drive that I know has a working bootable copy of Leopard on it, and then all I get is the eternal cycle, without pressing any keys on startup.
I also tried holding down the Option (Alt) key on boot to get the boot device selector. This correctly identifies the various boot devices - the DVD, on-board HDD and external firewire drive (if connected), and lets you select them, tries to boot, thinks, black screen, screen lights up, chime, repeat cycle endlessly until extremely frustrated.
Is there a known cure for this or am I doomed to take the thing back to the Apple store on Monday?
Thanks
Konrad

Answer 1

Raj wrote:
That is not the reason it didn't work. Here is the actual clarity:
*A retail Leopard DVD should be able to boot a new Macbook Pro unibody.*
So you are saying even if the driver for the controller on which the DVD drive sits is not available in the Leopard DVD you are using because the hardware was not manufactured at the time the Leopard release on the DVD was made, the OS should magically just boot? How is that possible? Unibody MacBook Pros have entirely NEW AHCI chipset - for which there won't be any drivers on the older Leopard DVD and as such the DVD wont be detected once the OS on the DVD loads. In cases where the chipset used is same (as in previous generations of MBP) it will boot.
The key difference here is that if you used an older version, some new hardware may not be supported - however, the computer *should still boot from the DVD*, which is the subject of this discussion.
The OP said that his computer boots from the DVD that came with the computer - just not with the old retail Leopard DVD. Also - what should happen if the new hardware happens to be the controller on which the DVD drive is sitting? How will it be able to read the DVD? What about the graphics card? If the drivers on the old leopard disk do not recognize the new graphics card - how is the OS going to display on screen?
On my way home, I stopped at a Mac store and asked them to test this. They successfully booted a new Macbook Pro unibody from an older Leopard DVD. And this is why Apple is replacing my computer, because it is a hardware issue, not a software one.
Again - you fail to understand that whether or not the old DVD boots on a new machine all depends on how much hardware has changed and what hardware has changed. It may boot on some generation of machine because the basic chipset and graphics did not change or were handled generically by the drivers on the older DVD but it may totally refuse to boot on new gen machine which has totally different / incompatible hardware.
So your claim that any old Leopard DVD must continue to boot on any new machine is not really technically explainable.