Screen went black installing snow leopard

Snow Leopard install issues - black screen after Thread starter DonPaul Start date May 23, Status Not open for further replies. Hi everyone, I am in the process of building my first Hackintosh and have been perusing the guides and advice in here extensively. However I seem to be stuck. I am trying to get Lion installed on my computer but seem to be stuck after installing to update from the retail DVD to I then try the special Sandy Bridge installation instructions with UpdateHelper.

But every time I try to boot, I get the Mac logo and the spinning wheel for about 15 seconds before the screen goes black. I can here the hard drive boot up, so I'm assuming it's loading. It appears to be an issue with the graphics.

The only way I can seem to get things to work is if I boot in Safe Mode, in that case I have graphics. Otherwise, black. I do NOT have a graphics card installed.

The only thing I can think of is something using EasyBeast isn't updating the graphics properties. I tried searching for a custom DSDT for my motherboard but didn't find any seems that I didn't get an ideal motherboard? Anyway, I've tried redoing the install multiple times and tried various combos with MultiBeast with no success.

I'm hoping someone is able to help me out. You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. Joined Aug 29, Messages 4 Reaction score 4 Points 3. 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? I Pressed the power button — nothing. Hmmm…held down the power button for a long time 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…. 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?

I used the flashlight to finish the install. There is obviously a problem on some Mac laptops where the proper video driver is not working during the install process. I hope this helps anyone with a similar problem. Great of you to come post this merlin!! Nice job figuring things out Sounds like it was some sort of screen brightness issue I'm curious Glad to hear the install went well Very odd! Click to expand Yes, everything seems normal now all function keys including illumination No startup chime.

The Superdrive, hard drive and fans spun up, but the screen remained black. The boot started from the HD and the DVD, but after about 30 seconds, with Apple logo and spinning "cog wheel", the screen went black. And seemed to shut down. With the external FW hard drive, the drive made a loud click, its LED went off, then it came back on after a few seconds, as if it had lost all power to it, then the LED lit up when power returned to it from the shut down MB. Anyway, the installs failed.

I then attached the 2. It showed up on the 2. I then looked under Startup Disk and the 2. I booted the 2. I ran check Permissions, and a huge list of permissions to repair came out.

At this point, I've left things as they are. The 2. I didn't want to go any further, for fear of screwing things up, now that I've got some normality back.

In system prefs, under Monitor, only the external monitor shows up. No option for mirroring and the MB display isn't listed. Both the black screen and no iSight camera are weird problems, as they literally came out of the blue. Boot from your Reformat the drive using the "write zeros" option to map out any bad blocks. Give the drive one partition.

Install the system. Download and install only the See how it goes. If all is OK, download the rest and install. Let us know y7our results. Please give us the last three figures of your serial number. Move the screen up and down after booting and getting a good signal on the external monitor and see if the display changes at all. Update: I can confirm that there is a problem with battery power. It boots only from AC.

This does not sound like a recall issue to me besides it does not have the recalled GPU. Since the external monitor works, your issues is with the cables. Hold a flashlight at an angle to the monitor and see if you can discern the desktop and let us know. Thanks Mayer. No idea re. It's not that the inverter or backlight is out.

I get to the startup screen, which is bright, as if normal, then the spinning wheel comes up and spins for about minutes, then screen goes black. So there is video onscreen, just not for long.

It is weird. Everything was working fine till 2 days ago, until I did the Actually, it was all normal after the Really frustrating. But if I can't resolve this I'll just have to call Apple and see what they say. I know that OS and firmware updates can cause hardware problems. I've seen it in the past with Powerbooks, for example, where updates killed RAM.