Installing Snow Leopard on 10.5.8 macbook.

What exactly do you want? Is it to upgrade Leopard or do you want to make a separate Snow Leopard partition?

Five ways to eject a stuck CD or DVD from the optical drive

Ejecting the stuck disc can usually be done in one of the following ways:

1. Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the left mouse button until the disc ejects.

2. Press the Eject button on your keyboard.

3. Click on the Eject button in the menubar.

4. Press COMMAND-E.

5. If none of the above work try this:

Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder. At the prompt enter or paste the following:

/usr/bin/drutil eject.

If this fails then try this:

Boot the computer into single-user mode. At the prompt enter the same command as used above. To restart the computer enter "reboot" at the prompt without quotes.

To resize the drive or add a new partition:

1. Open Disk Utility and select the drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list.

2. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.

3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed. +(Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)+

4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.

You should now have a new volume on the drive.

I'm unclear on what you have done to your machine. Will it start up normally at this point? Try holding down the mouse button at startup to eject whatever disk is in the drive... what happens when you try to restart with no disk in the drive?

As for installing SL, does your machine meet the [Snow Leopard system requirements|http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html]? Do you have a retail SL disk, with a picture of a snow leopard on the disk, or are you trying to install using a gray system disk that shipped with a newer machine?

Are you using your MacBook Pro install DVD to try and install on your Macbook?

JimEastwood wrote:
I found a thread that said boot from disc - partition drive setting aside 5GB to install snow leopard- and it will work to install to the other ~75GB, or whatever. I've since lost thread.

I think you misunderstood whatever that thread was talking about. You do not need to partition your startup drive with a separate partition to install Snow Leopard on it -- in fact 5 GB is too small a partition for installing Snow Leopard (which requires some temporary disk space to assemble the OS for installation). The thread may have been talking about creating a partition for a clone of the Snow Leopard installer DVD (so you can use that instead of the DVD itself for the install on the other partition) but that is not necessary.

Disc Boot would still not install Snow Leopard.

What is "Disc Boot"?

Somehow i'm at Restore Your System with no time machine attached though. My OSX has been erased when i partitioned drive. Now I have no where to go. I can't eject disc.

I'm at the starfield. My top menu has
-Mac OSX installer
-File
-Edit
-Utilities
-Window

Where do you see "Restore Your System"? Did you start up from a white retail Snow Leopard installer disc or your original grey system disc #1? It sounds like you may have tried to follow the instructions in the "Install & Setup Guide" document for "Restoring your System."

If you partitioned your HD then you received a warning that everything on it would be erased. If you do not have a backup, then everything on it is gone.

JimEastwood wrote:
to add insult to injury:
i lost original leopard install disc or my gf did …

One small bright spot: you should be able to call Apple & with the serial number of your MBP get a replacement set of grey system disks sent to you at a nominal cost, typically a little less than a retail copy of Snow Leopard. (System disc sets are not available from retail stores.)

It is worth investing in a set of system discs even if you get Snow Leopard. With an erased HD, you have no way of reinstalling the bundled apps that came with your MBP (like the iLife suite). Snow Leopard retail discs *do not* include these apps. Although they will be the versions that came with the MBP & not the current ones, the replacement discs are worth getting unless you plan on buying the current versions for still more money.

The system discs also contain the Apple Hardware Test (AHT), which is system-specific & is not available from any other source. AHT is necessary to test for any hardware defects your MBP might develop.