Problems upgrading MacBook HDD

I have a white MacBook. Not sure what year, but reasonably recent...probably 2009 or so. The model number is worn off the bottom. The hard drive died. Just started going click, click, click.

So I got a Samsung SSD 830 series (MZ-7PC128) 128 Gig drive to replace the toasted drive. The additional difficulty is that the superdrive is not working either. Just immediately spits out any disc that is put in. So I used my other computer to image the OSX Snow Leopard DVD to a 8 gig USB memory stick and booted off that. It worked perfectly and completed the installation with no errors.

However, when trying to boot off the SSD, it just sits at the gray apple screen and spins indefinitely. Have tried resetting the PRAM. Won't boot into safe mode either.

When doing a verbose boot, near the end of the log, there are several lines that look like this:

IOHDIXController::createDriveInKernel: returning error 0x6b

Any ideas on what to try?

EDIT: looks like SSD firmware can only be updated on PC and I only have another Mac.

I don't know about the main problem, but yes you need a real PC to update the Samsung firmware (no doubt applies to many other drives too).

Don't buy that brand again until they learn about the rest of the world.

The Crucial M4, Intel, and OCZ drives can all be updated without having to purchase/install an otherwise unnecessary operating system. There's no need to throw money at a more clueless maker.

Cheers

Another thought on the "main" problem:

When I had to do this same procedure for my wife's MacBook, I installed the OS to the new drive with a USB/SATA adapter on another Mac (like so) and it worked great.

I bought that drive specifically because it had a great reputation for being plug and play with Macs. Figured from all the positive reviews that I wouldn't need to update the firmware...

It's taken me months to save enough for the drive and have it and a OSX dvd brought down to Belize, so I'm kinda stuck with it. You can't just buy that kind of thing off the shelf here. It seems to work perfectly until it tries to create a series of temporary disks on startup and then dies with the error above. I'll try to get the a more complete boot log later.

Neither fsck nor Disk Utility report any errors with the drive.

Same here, I'll take a little inconvenience for the knowledge that the drive I'm using is better tested under OSX than others.

In my case I have several PCs on hand anyway.

I actually just purchased this SSD (MZ-7PC128B/WW) for installation in a Mac Mini.

When I go to Samsung's site, I don't see a firmware update. Can you point me to where you're seeing one? Maybe the "B" at the end of mine means it's a different model?

Actually, now that I look closer, I have the same drive and you're correct, there's no firmware updates for it.

To narrow down what model you have, what does the bottom look like? Does it have a removable battery, or is it sealed in under a slightly rubbery bottom piece?

My thought is that if it's the sealed in model, OS X 10.6.0 is too old to support the hardware, but close enough the installer ran. I think those models shipped with 10.6.1 or 10.6.2 if it was from late 2009.

Do you have the ability to plug in the SSD to the other machine you have easily? Could always do the 10.6 install there, update it, then move it back to the Macbook.

It has a removable battery. Just turn the knob with a quarter and it pops right out.

I had Snow Leopard on there before the disk died, but it was an upgrade from Leopard. Not sure what it originally came with because it was donated.

I can pop the drive in a USB caddy and install it on my MacBook Pro (2010). That was my next attempt.

It could be that the SSD is SATA 6Gbit/s and it's only backward compatible down to SATA 3Gbit/s. A Macbook with (easily) removable battery might only have a SATA 1.5Gbit/s controller.

They're supposed to be compatible at all SATA bus speeds. All of the 6gb/sec drives I have here work fine at 3gb/sec and 1.5gb/sec.

It's working now.

After installing OSX from the USB drive a few times, each time noodling with how I was cloning the installation DVD to the USB drive, I concluded that the installation source wasn't the problem.

I booted into the installer and started Disk Utility and erased the SSD, writing zeros to the entire disk. I then re-installed the same way as I'd done several previous times, but this time it worked. I guess the installer wasn't overwriting whatever the problem was upon re-installation until I completely erased the drive. Whatever. As long as it works...

Strange. Glad you got it to work at last.

I forgot one alternate path you could have taken since you have two Macs. Target Disk Mode, and you could have gone either way. With the Macbook in TDM, the install could have been run from the other machine. Or, with the other machine in TDM, the MacBook could have used the good DVD drive.

A tidbit for the future in any case.

Hmm. Still having some weird issues. VLC won't install properly. Keeps giving me a "file can't be read or written" problem. When I use disk utility to repair permissions, it shows a bunch of errors that it has repaired, but then when I check permissions again, the same errors are there. Everything else I've installed seems to be working properly.

Is there any way to find out which file VLC is bombing out on when I copy it into the applications folder? perhaps a log file somewhere?

EDIT: I've re-downloaded VLC 4 times, so I'm pretty sure the source file is not the problem.

Open "Console" in the Utilities folder, and check All Messages on the left. Then try the copy and see if any new relevant log entries appear.

Thanks Tom, that's what I was looking for.

Unfortunately, nothing appears in the logs.

What's actually going on behind the scenes when you copy an app to the Applications folder? Is it something I can do from a terminal and see if I can get better feedback?

Most applications have you download a disk image, which OS X will mount. Applications themselves are just folders that OS X changes to appear as a single item.

To copy them from Terminal, do the following:

• Double click the disk image in the finder first to mount it (no need to do this via the terminal)
• "mount" to see where it's mounted at. Look for something like this:
  Code:

  /dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/vlc-2.0.4

• "ls /Volumes/vlc-2.0.4" to see the files, look for the one with .app as a folder extension
• "cp -Rv /Volumes/vlc-2.0.4/VLC.app/ /Applications/" to copy the folder to Applications. -R is for recursive, v for verbose.