My Macbook (2006) cannot boot from USB, is there any way to solve this?

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My Macbook (2006) cannot boot from USB, is there any way to solve this?

I bought a retail copy of Snow Leopard 10.6.3 and upon trying to install it via optical drive, it fails every time. I'm certain that the drive itself has issues reading discs. So instead I opted to install my retail Snow Leopard onto a USB flash drive (a 32GB Kingston stick) but this macbook absolutely refuses to boot via USB. I've used Carbon Copy Cloner and Disk Utility but neither has yielded results. I've spent so many hours trying to install this OS, does anyone know what's going on??

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Dec 1, 2012 2:42 AM

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ubertome Author

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Mar 6, 2014 1:36 AM in response to ubertome

Late reply, but if anyone is experiencing the same problem, I've found a solution. For whatever reason, some macbooks don't recognize usb flash drives during the boot-up phase, even though the usb ports themselves are powered (I tested this with a multimeter). The solution then, was to use an external USB hard drive that has its own power supply to install Snow Leopard. I don't know why, but it's the only way I got my macbook (Macbook 2,1/A1181) to recognize the install drive. Every was smooth sailing from there!

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