Hi guys
I'm having a spring clean on all the office machines at work, and when it comes down to working on the Mac Pro, I get a message saying the disc is unreadable. I've also tried remote install, and I don't get a boot-up option for the install, just the regular hard drive.
I thought it was because the OS currently installed is a later version, but it worked on the iMac (the Mac Mini is not Intel).
Thoughts?
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.3)
Internal Super Drive is not malfunction?
You can purchase a new disk from Apple for about $20.
I should have said that other discs work in the machine, burning or playing (audio).
BOOTABLE and READABLE are two distinct issues.
That DVD should be able to be inserted under any version of Mac OS X and have Icons appear -- otherwise it (or your drive) is defective.
If you cannot BOOT from it, that is a completely different issue. That is likely because the Mac is too new to use the system from the DVD as a Boot System. It could also be that the disc is a model-specific version for a different model Mac. (These are known to NOT contain "drivers for every appropriate Mac".
The physical disc cannot be read on the Mac Pro, other discs can.
Choosing where to boot from (Alt on startup) only shows the hard drive where the OS is installed, nothing else including directly linked from my laptop via ethernet, as well as over the wired network.
I had a similar problem while trying to repair an elderly iMac. I had to call Apple and order a Snow Leopard disk. It was about $20 and can't be purchased at Apple Stores.
Pretty painless, but I think it was 10.6.3 and finding the updater to 10.6.8 was a bit of a challenge.
I've already got a disc, which worked on the iMac I reformatted previously.
Those Installer discs are Dual-Layer DVDs.
A common failure mode of Readers is to lose the ability to read either CDs or DVDs (separately) because they use different lasers.
Do you have an external DVD drive? If so, try plugging that into the Mac Pro and see if it boots from there. It seems to be one of three things, the drive is on its last legs, the disk is on its way to becoming unreadable or the Mac Pro can’t run the version of Snow Leopard on the disk. The last one can be checked by referencing MacTracker.
OS Snow Leopard Install Disc is not Readable
