Snow Leopard is out and upgrade went smoothly on two Macbook (unibody 2008) and just horribly on an older MacBook Pro (2007):

EOS Utility crashes when trying to download photos from my Canon. This is on version 2.6.1 so that is not the problem. 2.5 also crashed.

Blank Screen on Install. So wierd I don’t know what to say, but apparently on older MacBook Pros, Snow Leopard turns off the backlight and you can’t see the screen.

Update. Went to AppIe Store. Look coincidental. Had a total motherboard failure. I love AppleCare!

I powered up my Apple 17” MacBook Pro with Mac OSX10.5.8, installed the Snow Leopard disk and started the install. I answered the licensing agreement and pressed continue. At this point I walked away for a few minutes to let the install continue. I returned a few minutes later to a completely black screen! What is this? Oddly my AC power light was RED but other than there were no signs of life.

I Pressed the power button – nothing. Hmmm…held down the power button for a long time (6-8 sec) and I got the machine to boot. The Apple logo showed on a gray screen with the small circular progress circle. After 10 secs the machine turned off! I tried this again several times with the same results. I then held down the power key while holding the option key and got the icon for the hard drive with EFI boot and the DVD boot icon. I tried the EFI boot option and got the same results. The machine just keep turning off. I repeated this method and selected the DVD boot option…same thing.

At this point I was seriously regretting installing a brand new OS on MacBook Pro and I set the machine aside so I could come back later with a solution. Meanwhile I search the internet for anyone else with this problem. I could not find any posts related to my problem.

An hour later, I went back to my machine to try again. I noticed the laptop was very warm. Very odd considering it was off….or so I thought! It was actually on but there was no LCD backlight! I got out a flashlight so I could see what was on the screen and what do you know?…the Install screen was there. The Power light was still RED not GREEN. I used the flashlight to finish the install. When it finally rebooted, the LCD turned back on and my upgrade was complete: data & apps in tact! There is obviously a problem on some Mac laptops where the proper video driver is not working during the install process.

Macbook Pro 13″ Snow Leopard Blank Screen – Mac Forums is another report, but unlike me, I don’t get anything when I try to restart. But the computer is running

When I installed Snow Leopard, it did the installer for a bit, but then the screen went black and the CD drive stopped spinning. After 10 minutes or so, I held the power button and rebooted, only to see the flashing folder with a ‘?’ in the middle. Now when I try to run the Snow Leopard DVD, it shows the normal boot procedure, but then when it should be going into the installer, the display goes blank instead, but I can still hear the CD drive spinning as if it’s doing everything correctly except starting the display. I got it working again by reseting my PRAM, so give that a shot.

Black screen while installing Snow Leopard on a Macbook Pro? It’s not frozen, the backlight is simply switched off : apple

The display was not in power save mode, but active, just without the backlighting. The content was very faintly visible in a bright enough environment.

It happened after the reboot when the second phase of the installation began. No keypresses and no amount of wiggling were helping; the backlight controls (FN+F1/F2) weren’t working either.

Interestingly, an external Cinema Display worked just fine – it didn’t do me any good, though, since it wasn’t mirroring and the dialog boxes were still stuck on the internal display.

Black screen while installing Snow Leopard on a Macbook Pro? It’s not frozen, the backlight is simply switched off : apple

Same thing happened to me, and I have the same machine – 1st gen 15″ Intel MBP. Backlight keys didn’t work until the install was finished. I actually did a hard reboot before I figured out that shining a bright light at the screen gave me enough light to finish the install.

Black screen while installing Snow Leopard on a Macbook Pro? It’s not frozen, the backlight is simply switched off : apple

I had the same problem, this is what happened:

The nVidia graphics card went bad, you need to take it to Apple for a free replacement. I had the exact same issue, and it took me 2-3 hours to figure out the issue. They tested it and it was replaced in 2 days – the Apple person said this is a HUGE problem and they are billing nVidia to fix each one. The fact that you were doing an install is coincidental, and unfortunate since it would seem like the likely culprit.

2 responses to “Snow Leopard is out and here are the bugs”

  1. rich Avatar

    Never had this before. I have heard of this happening because of the nVidia driver problem. My case was coincidental hardware failure.

  2. jpelker Avatar
    jpelker

    I’m getting a straight power-down during install. Happened once trying to upgrade and that messed up the boot record, so I wiped the hard drive hoping to do a fresh install and still, power down in the middle of the installer. I checked with light and listened for any signs of it just being the display going to sleep, but I think the install is failing each time.

    I actually used this disc successfully on my other computer, so I believe it works. Did anyone else have a similar issue?

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