Ram Upgrade Issues

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Ram Upgrade Issues

I recently ordered a 4 GB (2x2gb) Crucial ram upgrade for my Early 2008 White Macbook, thinking I could get another year out of it at least. I followed the Apple instructions to the letter, and at first the ram didn't work. So, having seen the trick work on PC's, I switched the sticks and reseated them. It worked fine, and I saw them in System Profiler, Activity Monitor, etc. I decided to reinstall 10.6 and get ready to purchase 10.7 - I created a second partition, installed 10.6, and started to transfer files from the older partition via Finder. At about 80% of the transfer, it froze completely, and had to be powercycled.

On reboot, I got the Apple logo, and it hung there for about 15 min, so I powercycled again to try the other partition and got the same result. I shut it off manually one more time, and it rebooted to a white screen. No key combinations work, Im unable to reset PRAM, or even boot from optical media. I tried replacing the original Ram, and i have the same result. I also have tried all combinations of old and new ram to no avail. I tried booting without ram just to make sure I got the error beeps, which I did. It just hangs on a blank white screen now WITH the original Ram in there. Anyone know what could be up with my machine?

Macbook White, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Early 2008

Posted on Aug 19, 2011 7:50 PM

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fullproof Author

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Aug 22, 2011 3:34 PM in response to fullproof

I found that it was actually my hard drive. The boot sector must have been really messed up. I read a post that where the user had this similar problem (minus the RAM ordeal) and an Apple Representative diagnosed a failing hard drive. I determined that it was my dual boot - situation that I had going on, then adding another partition. I had been adding partitions from two different OS's and I think it just got out of control. I confirmed with a spare 2.5 SATA drive I had laying around. Im typing from the machine in question. It is my understanding that a bad hard drive, or in my case partition scheme, can really throw off the boot process.

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