Help Reinstalling Snow Leopard (2009 13-Inch MacBook)

[Anonymous]

Heyo,
I've fished my old 2009 13-inch MacBook out of the closet, and naturally I wish to give it a proper factory-default refurbishment. The easiest option to me was creating a bootable USB, which is what's confusing me at the moment.

I download a 10.6.3 ISO and tried restoring with Disk Utility and balenaEtcher, but the MacBook doesn't recognize the USB, and so far it seems no amount of ISOs or reflashing works.

This link did originally work for me (with DMGs only). The MacBook recognized the USB, but the installation fails with "The Installer could not copy the necessary support files". The Installer Log says:

"no system packages found"
"No or Invalid system receipts found on /Volumes/Macintosh HD"
"Attempting fallback"
"Finding system files..."
"Writing system path cache"
"Error writing cache"
I won't post the whole output, because every DMG I've tried has failed and gives me different errors.

Any help? I know one option is to burn to a disk, but I don't have any, and I'd rather just use a USB.

Thanks!

 

[adespoton]

You'll need either a MacBook install DVD or a retail 10.6.x install DVD. The MacBook came with 10.6.1, so should theoretically work. Note that 10.6.8 is digitally signed, and the root cert that signed it has expired, so a bit more work is needed to install it (eg, set the clock back to when the root cert was valid first).

My method is to format my drive so it's got an 8GB partition on it, and then restore the ISO to that partition with Disk Utility. Then boot off that partition. I do this for OS X PB through 10.6, as it gives me a nice emergency boot/recovery partition should anything go wrong in the future with the main OS -- plus, it's faster than using optical media directly.

Most likely the DMGs you've been using are not the right images for your computer. apple-osx-snow-leopard from MG has versions verified to boot 2009 MBP and 2009 iMac, so theoretically they should work on the MB as well. Just make sure to use the right image.

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the advice! Unfortunately, trying a new usb worked... I used the 10.6.3 DMG that's on Archive.org

 

[Byrd]

Also very dependant on the USB stick used; I came across several USB 2.0 rated 8 - 16GB sticks that wouldn't reliably boot an OS X install (or come up with errors during the install).