I powered up my Apple 17” MacBook Pro with Mac OSX10.5.8, installed the Snow Leopard disk and started the install. I answered the licensing agreement and pressed continue. At this point I walked away for a few minutes to let the install continue. I returned a few minutes later to a completely black screen! What is this? Oddly my AC power light was RED but other than there were no signs of life.



I Pressed the power button – nothing. Hmmm…held down the power button for a long time (6-8 sec) and I got the machine to boot. The Apple logo showed on a gray screen with the small circular progress circle. After 10 secs the machine turned off! I tried this again several times with the same results. I then held down the power key while holding the option key and got the icon for the hard drive with EFI boot and the DVD boot icon. I tried the EFI boot option and got the same results. The machine just keep turning off. I repeated this method and selected the DVD boot option…same thing.



At this point I was seriously regretting installing a brand new OS on MacBook Pro and I set the machine aside so I could come back later with a solution. Meanwhile I search the internet for anyone else with this problem. I could not find any posts related to my problem.



An hour later, I went back to my machine to try again. I noticed the laptop was very warm. Very odd considering it was off….or so I thought! It was actually on but there was no LCD backlight! I got out a flashlight so I could see what was on the screen and what do you know?...the Install screen was there. The Power light was still RED not GREEN. I used the flashlight to finish the install. When it finally rebooted, the LCD turned back on and my upgrade was complete: data & apps in tact! There is obviously a problem on some Mac laptops where the proper video driver is not working during the install process.



I hope this helps anyone with a similar problem.