Calling all/any Mac experts!

[stopthekilling77]

My buddy just bought a brand new Core i7 Macbook Pro, and as I've been his "computer guy" for a while I bought his older MBP 4.1 (Penryn) for a very reasonable price! Me being me, I decided I'd wipe his hard drive clean and install Ubuntu 10.04. I've played around with Ubuntu for a while now, and I've decided I want to try OSX natively, and I have the disk for Snow Leopard he got for it. Problem is that my hard drive is wiped now and I can't for the life of me find anything out there about installing OSX 10.6 to a fresh, unformatted hard drive. Everything I've seen says to format the hard drive to HFS+ with journaling but using my live cd of 10.04 gparted has HFS+ grayed out as an option. All the install guides I've found require that a previous version of OSX be installed. I'm tired and I've been trying to figure this out the last hour or so. I just want to get SL on here but I'm losing steam. Any help would be appreciated!

[Sttm]

Id go into an Apple store and ask a "genius"; surely they would know such things, being geniuses.

[hnzw_rui]

My buddy just bought a brand new Core i7 Macbook Pro, and as I've been his "computer guy" for a while I bought his older MBP 4.1 (Penryn) for a very reasonable price! Me being me, I decided I'd wipe his hard drive clean and install Ubuntu 10.04. I've played around with Ubuntu for a while now, and I've decided I want to try OSX natively, and I have the disk for Snow Leopard he got for it. Problem is that my hard drive is wiped now and I can't for the life of me find anything out there about installing OSX 10.6 to a fresh, unformatted hard drive. Everything I've seen says to format the hard drive to HFS+ with journaling but using my live cd of 10.04 gparted has HFS+ grayed out as an option. All the install guides I've found require that a previous version of OSX be installed. I'm tired and I've been trying to figure this out the last hour or so. I just want to get SL on here but I'm losing steam. Any help would be appreciated!

Have you tried just using the OSX install disc to format the raw hard drive? Or are you planning on dual-booting?

[stopthekilling77]

I've tried holding down "c" while booting up with the OSX disk in the superdrive with no success. I get a message about kernel panic and how it can't continue. I reaaally don't want to waste money going into the Apple store! There's gotta be a way to get a successful install at home, right?

[smack323]

ok I am just going off my memory here so this will be vague but I remember someone in a OS class of mine last october had the same problem. After installing linux he couldnt get OSX to install. I want to say some boot info from Linux was stopping the install even after he formatted the HD. I want to say he had to use a utility to wipe the hard drive- maybe something like Darik's Boot And Nuke.. Sorry I dont have more details- maybe this wil work for you.

[stopthekilling77]

Thanks smack323! I'm going to give that a shot tonight, and I'll let you know if it wasn't the golden key I needed!

[stopthekilling77]

Well, I'm going into the Apple Store tomorrow. I've DBAN-ed the hdd, taken the MBP fully apart, ran a hard drive test, then put it in a SATA enclosure and formatted it correctly via my buddy's new i7 MBP.

Still won't install. "Cannot install OSX on this system" or something to that effect. I've thrown everything logical against this thing, so the next reasonable step is to let the proprietary technicians do their voodoo.
Thanks anyway guys!

[smack323]

well that sucks, let us know how it goes. I am curious what the "fix" is.

[smack323]

did you ever get your Mac working? what was the issue?

[stopthekilling77]

Well the real issue here is a lack of funds to sate the Apple Store demigods. I'll likely be heading over to the store next week when I have some spare cash. Figure after all the headaches, I'm likely going to use the machine for a week or two then sell it for a down payment on a car