Also, have you tried safe booting? It is possible that migration assistant re-installed a startup item that is incompatible with Snow Leopard, like, perhaps, an out of date version of WindowShadeX.
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Unable to Boot White MacBook
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?
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Answers
Hi Strung, I'm pretty sure I set the partition map to GUID. Seems like you're on to something w/ your second post. I reformatted the drive, reinstalled Snow Leopard, but this time did not migrate the previous settings. Just created a temp user and was able to use the computer & reboot w/ no problem and download & apply OS updates.
Then I went ahead & used Migration Assistant to bring over all the apps & settings. Seemed OK, but then tried to restart & boom, same problem. Stuck at startup screen w/ spinning timer icon.
Finally got this resolved. I ended up using CCCloner to copy a working system from my own MacBook over to this computer. I then ran Migration Assistant to transfer over all the user's Apps & Data from the backup I had made on to an external drive.
There must have been something incompatible b/t Snow Leopard and the user's original settings b/c the 1st time I used Migration Assistant, I used it to copy everything, including the settings, and this would result in the system locking up. So then I tried again w/o importing the Settings and this time it worked.
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by: strungPosted on 2009-11-07 at 04:36:31ID: 25766049
When you reformatted the drive were you careful to make sure the partition map was set to GUID, not Apple Partition Map?