How very very annoying.

Because I spend a lot of time loading fresh installs of OSX in 10.4 and 10.5 flavours onto customers Macs following drive replacements or upgrades I don't really have the time to sit through the time it takes to install from the original DVD. Leopard in particular can take a long time to install on slower macs.

Instead I keep a disk image of each installer on the server and use that, much much faster that way. Until now. Until I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard.

I twigged that somethng was wrong when the second MacBook in a row refused to boot following an install, showing the flashing folder icon that means no bootable drive or system detected. Hmm, two new drives in a row with defects? Not likely.

By the time I was doing the second install I had forgotten that following the first failure I reverted to using my SL install disk. This time it clicked. When running Snow Leopard, the installer will happily run and install all the files on the new drive, however it then renders the new drive unbootable (I trying to work out how). So far my options are to have a handy 10.5 partition on my MacBook Pro (or a 10.5 drive to boot from) so that I can install direct from it again, or revert to using my 10.5 install DVD and drinking more coffee.

Time to put the kettle on then.