Backup successful - unable to boot

[kahmedsid]

I used the Disk Utility to partition the drive and from Options made sure I selected GUID (the last one was selected by default, forget the name but it was for windows and dos type os's).

Should I just re-install on this drive using the Snow Leopard CD or is there still hope? There is NO DATA at all on it yet, just a vanilla OS-X install with all updates. I think I have tried doing that on another macbook before and it said go re-partition using GUID, and the disk utility failed to re-partition becuase the disk was 320GB and internal. When it's external, it has no issues (not sure why).

[kahmedsid]

I booted off of the OSX CD and selected to re-install on the same drive. It is working on it now with 42 minutes remaining. I'll update later.

[kahmedsid]

Oh well, the attempt to install OS-X failed shortly after my last update, saying not possible to install OS-X, please contact provider or try again. Arghhh ...

I'll try running repair, permissions, etc ... on disk and if all fails, probably re-format it tomorrow.

Btw, I double checked, partition table map was indeed GUID.

[dnanian]

This really sounds like a drive that's not properly partitioned. I can't think of any other reason why it would refuse to install.

[kahmedsid]

Since last night, I've re-formatted the drive writing zeros to every possible bit (took over 3 hours). This morning, I tried installing using the Snow Leopard CD, it recognized the drive as healthy and started installing but hung immediately (maybe one of the bad snow leopard install disks, I don't know).

So, I replaced disks, booted off of the one that has a healthy Snow Leopard installation, re-formatted the external drive. This time used CarbonCopyCloner to clone the drive. Clone went flawlessly. Booted up with the drive still external via USB, Success!

Swapped drives, booted up, held down Option key to select internal drive (just to be safe) - but it's back to the same behavior. The spinning indicator is spinning away

I've used superduper in the past and never had issues, I am beginning to suspect something with the new macbook pro with 10.6.2 on it.

The drive in question is a Hitachi 320GB 7200 SATA.

Is there a location that would have logs related to the unsuccessful bootup?

[dnanian]

So, didn't work with SD! or CCC, but a clean installation with SL worked fine.

It's possible that the system.log on the failed boot drive (e.g. /Volumes/the-internal-drive/private/var/log/system.log) may indicate what's failing here.

[kahmedsid]

Wanted to provide an update:

Today was spent doing several things involving re-format, re-partition, re-install, re-clone, etc. and everything led to the same conclusion; the drive boots only when it is external.

By the way, the firmware of this computer was updated by the most recent security updates so that could be a contributing factor (not validated though).

Spent over an hour with a real smart guy at the Genius Bar, he tried everything I had tried and he was also pretty confused. The fact that the drive works flawlessly when external but fails when placed internally is pretty strange.

He's offered to replace the laptop - considering it ...