My client has a white MacBook (MacBook 3,1) running OS X 10.5.1 that was no longer booting up. It would turn on but lock up quickly on a black screen w/ output of the some boot-time results, including some kernel panic message. Over that was overlayed a message that "You need to restart your computer..."
I was able to boot the computer just fine using an external Firewire drive cloned from another working MacBook. So it appeared that there was no problem with failing components (at least not w/ the RAM or the logic board).
I tried to use a Snow Leopard DVD to reinstall the OS but after booting from the DVD, I got a message that "Mac OS X cannot be installed on this computer. For Mac OS X system requirements see the "Read Before you Install" document on your Mac OS X installation disc."
I found that odd b/c this is a 2.2 Ghz machine w/ 1 Gig of RAM and therefore meets the minimum hardware requirements. So then I tried w/ a regular Leopard 10.5 DVD and also got that same ""Mac OS X cannot be installed on this computer" error.
So then I booted back off the external firewire drive, ran CCCloner to clone the drive, rebooted off the Snow Leopard DVD, used Disk Utility to erase the HD, and this time was able to successfully install Snow Leopard and then used Migration Assistant to restore all apps, data & user info from the backup on the external drive.
Thought everything was fine. But then I powered down and turned it back on. Got the startup chime and seemed like it was booting but then just got stuck at the startup screen w/ the spinning timer. After waiting for 15 min, I powered it down & tried again. Same result.
Started up from SL DVD again. opened Disk Utility and ran "Verify Disk." That checked out fine. But then when I ran "Verify Disk Permissions" it got stuck w/ 1 minute left on the estimated time.
The SMART status shows as "Verified." But I'm starting to suspect that maybe this HDD is not 100% healthy.
Anyone have suggestions as to what to do next?
