Never saw this before - OS upgrade 2008 MacBook Pro

[mikehalloran]

Here's a weird one.

2008 MacBook Pro 1260 Core2 Duo with a 320G hard drive, OS 10.6.8. 2G RAM.

My buddy looks it up, sees that it can be updated to Yosemite and runs the updater. Won't boot when done, won't mount. Ok... Brings it to me... I test the drive and get it to mount in a dock so that the data could be recovered. It passes every test I throw at it so we try again.

Long story short, this drive would let any OS be installed but wouldn't boot the Mac past 10.6.8.

The fix was to spend $79 on a new 750G WD drive and everything worked fine. I suggested an SSD but it is seven year old laptop.

All I can figure is that the firmware on the disk was somehow corrupted or otherwise limited even though the platter was in good shape. I've never seen this before.

[EMRR]

Strange. How is it performing now? I have an early 2008 MBP that is running 10.9 with 4gb ram, and it really struggles to do much. Long lags for any action are normal. The RAM just isn't there to do much more than idle. I have thought about trying an SSD but it's hard to justify spending anything on it. I have considered rolling it back to 10.6 which was running fine a few months ago.

[frankf]

I have one of these, a 3,1, just sitting here now. I upgraded mine to 6gb RAM and put in an SSD (240gb cheap now) and it was great for a basic DP 8 machine. Never ran anything higher than ML. I used it for editing, basic MIDI sketches, and ran my film seminars on it. The cool thing is the Express 34 slot. I have an eSata adapter and got great speed from external drives


Frank Ferrucci

[mikehalloran]

Strange. How is it performing now? I have an early 2008 MBP that is running 10.9 with 4gb ram, and it really struggles to do much. Long lags for any action are normal. The RAM just isn't there to do much more than idle. I have thought about trying an SSD but it's hard to justify spending anything on it. I have considered rolling it back to 10.6 which was running fine a few months ago.

This MBP is being used by my buddy's daughter, a college kid. Looking through the apps, primarily school work (Office etc.) music through iTunes and YouTube videos. She wanted the update to sync her iPhone like the rest of her friends. Since a MBP that old doesn't support all of Yosemite, I have no idea how well this will work out--certainly better than in 10.6.8 where almost no iOS compatability is found.

When he went to Fry's to buy the new drive, we knew that, if it didn't work out, he was heading to the Apple Store later. He hopes it gets her through two more years of undergrad. Good luck on that.

My daughter's is nearly as old and she's doing fine with it. I imagine that, when she gets into grad school, Mom and Dad will get her something newer. She's not complaining and I'm not pushing. Now that I think of it, I didn't have this issue with hers--no doubt because I bought a new HD when I updated her to Mavericks last year.

[bayswater]

Wasn't there some kind of change in the way OS X set up disks between 2008 and now? GUID or something like that?

[mikehalloran]

Wasn't there some kind of change in the way OS X set up disks between 2008 and now? GUID or something like that?

Apple_partition_scheme drives boot PPC; GUID_partition_scheme is required to boot an Intel Mac. Yes, I checked that.

This is normally an issue only with OS 10.5.x. Higher OS should only install on drives formatted GUID_partion_scheme.

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203195