Bizarre post-Leopard Macbook problem

This evening, after arriving home and being unable to connect to my Airport AGAIN, I gave up on Leopard and decided to put Tiger back on my machine. I backed up my stuff, found my original installation DVDs and set to work.

After booting to the 1st DVD, I clicked through the first installation screen and was greeted by the prompt 'This software cannot be installed on this computer'.

Sorry, what?

I went into Disk Utility, thinking that perhaps the GUID partition had been screwed up by installing leopards version of BootCamp. I partitioned, erased and rebooted the system, making sure the partition type was right.

Same thing on the reboot. Ok...what the hell? I restarted again and ejected the install DVD to make sure I had grabbed the right disc. Yep, '17-inch Macbook Pro'. How odd, thought I, as I wondered exactly what was happening.

So I decided to boot again, then time to the Leopard DVD I originally started with a few short days ago. Blinking folder. Peachy...just peachy. Reboot. Nope. Zap pram. Nope. Pray. Nope. Curse loudly. Nope.

Ok, let's see. What else can I do? I head to the closet and open my disc library (a cardboard box filled with obsolete software and various connectors to devices I no longer own). Hey...what's that? Oh, an install kit for a Macbook Pro.

Meh, what the hell...worth a shot. I threw the first disc in the drive, rebooted, clicked through and bam: install continues.

So, here's where I'm at: everything is back to 'normal' per se, but in order to get my system back up and running, I had to use a Macbook DVD, instead of the original discs that came with my computer!

Here's the info from the discs I used:
Original DVDs
- OS Version 10.4.6
- AHT Version 3a105
- Disc Version 1.0
- 2z691-5719-a

Saviour discs
- OS Version 10.4.8
- AHT Version 3a116
- Disc Version 1.0
- 2z691-5841-1

So yeah...pretty weird. I don't know exactly what happened...perhaps a firmware update of some sort since my machine was minted? Ghosts in the machine? Leopards revenge for removing it? Beats me...what do you think? Anyone seen this type of behavior before?

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  • 15"andBlue
    I am having the same problem with a 15" MACBOOK PRO... have tried almost every install disc I can beg borrow and steal... but squat.
    Am looking at bidding on the same disc as you yourself have used to reboot.

    This is a crazy little quirk and I am not happy with the situation, especially as Apple have a TERRIBLE habit of not even considering looking at a machine that is out of 'applecare' and as I am the 2nd owner I am considered more of a plague than anything else... like a human with feelings... or emotion... or the need to USE A BLOODY COMPUTER : (
  • I know in older builds of OS 9/10 you are not allowed to run things based on date of hardware to software, but i think its only a problem with older G3 etc systems but I'm not positive.
  • ScottMac
    Other than the jump from 10.4.6 to 10.4.8, I don't know. What's really frustrating is that if I hadn't had the other Macbook disc set handy, I'd have been out of luck...
  • Makes no sense.. You said you used a "17-inch Mac Book Pro" DVD and it didn't work.. then you used an "install kit for a Macbook Pro" and it did work... Um.. What's the difference?
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