Snow Leopard killed my Mac!

Maybe if I installed SL with the original card and went and got the latest driver off the web before trying to run with the nvidia installed everything would have worked. Instead of finding out I think I'll wait for a few updates.

SL has the drivers for the GTX 285, plus the Nvidia drivers are only for 10.5.7/.8 and won't help (and could hurt).

Any new OS, other than for testing, and with backup, I always reformat the drive so it strips and creates all new tables.

I've seen a couple people have trouble mixing up drivers. SL wasn't tested against 10.5.8 and presence of eVGA card drivers, so it is possible that any update will fail to resolve the extension driver is my guess. But SL does have native support and better than 10.5.8.

I called Apple after I got back from the first repair shop. I was very surprised, they were not rude, but I could just hear in their voice "dude who gives a **** and get off my phone".
The were both dual cores
After I installed SL ran fine, then noticed lots of freezing, then not starting properly, meaning that if I held down the shift key it would boot up fine and if I didnt I would get a the "?-folder". I read what I could then did all things suggested.
You know my first computer was the Apple IIe with two disk drives, 128k colored monitor, I had a subscription to Nibble magazine, man I was in love. I then got the LC, 7500/100, G3, G4, G5 dual processor, G5 dual core, G 5 dual core, 13" Macbook pro(wife), now a quad core 2.66.
I think that I must be a little mental when it comes to Mac and Apple. I have converted a bunch of people to go mac and to drop their PC's and every single one has thanked me for never shutting up about macs. So, when I talked with them on the phone I was hurt by their cavalier attitude towards me. Kind of like seeing your friend pinching your wife's butt. You think to yourself, "what just happened", nah, that didnt happened. Then later, after you process the info you say "what the ****".

Thank you all who responded to my post




p.s.
Just in case my wife reads this

Susi I know that that didnt happen and yes I love you more than my computer and you have all the hardware I need and in the right places.

p.s.s. should that be "hardware or software?" Hmm.

So now those two machines are dead, dead, dead. No click, no lights, no nothing. And neither is a G5.... I'm new to MPs so when I hear Duals, I hear G5s. But if they are newer Intel machines I would think that Apple has some obligation to you. What you experienced talking to the one rep isn't unusual, thats where the patience and persistence come in. If you're calm and don't get angry, repeated phone calls eventually can wear them down. Not always, but sometimes. Losing one Mac is bad, but two is ridiculous. They said nothing helpful at all? Or was it, "Sorry, no Applecare, no can do". Even with G5's, they were fixing or replacing peoples Macs at little or no charge. And few of those had Applecare.

All in all a bad situation. Hopefully, Susi will put cold towels on your forehead while whispering, "Every things ok, every things ok... (Harvey, anyone?)

My 2006 has had to have the Apple RAM pulled, was beginning to fail; the 7300GT seemed it too was "on the verge" and I wanted the 8800GT anyway.

There is a tiny button near the #4th PCI slot, visible after removing any card there, and any drive in bay #4. That is the SMC RESET button. 5-10 seconds.

Zap PRAM/NVRAM a couple times.

Pull all the hard drives. Something can happen if an OS install fails and you will need a new drive to get started.

I see but can't keep up with the threads over on the Snow Leopard AD forum, with a few "killed" and some mysterious superdrives no longer functioning.

Even a dead system can sometimes still run Apple Hardware Test; or can be kick-started. The G4 MDD had a habit of dying too. Pull battery and RAM and power cord, try to force it to boot (drain any charge) and then reconnect everything.

The G5 needed some Open Firmware love to trick the device tree into actually loading correctly and to clear out corrupt values.

"?" only means the path in nvram to the boot device is not found. Set Startup Disk control panel should fix that.

Before installing SL: backup or pull your existing system drive. Install a new drive and format it with SL DVD only. Clean install. If you want, you could format the new drive and restore 10.5.8 and then upgrade.

This new upgrade in place is new, first time so while it was tested and all, it is still 1.0 to me and to Mac OS. I did the upgrade once, did clean install later, and still prefer the old tried and true methods for installing a new OS.