Macbook late-2008 and Samsung SSD 830: what happened

Question

I'm trying to install a Samsung SSD 830 256 Gb disk as main disk on my macbook late-2008. I had several problems with my disk due to a couple of wrong choices (you can read the story here). I booted the machine from a Lion disk and I didn't succeed in formatting the disk in HFS due to a cryptic "Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed" error from the disk utility (both from GUI and terminal). Then I tried booting with a Snow Leopard disk and the disk utility refused to format the disk with another cryptic message "POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory". From terminal wasn't better "Error: 12: POSIX reports: cannot allocate memory". My conclusion is that Samsung SSD 830 is not supported.

That's the story.

Of course, there is a question: any suggestions?

UPDATE: I've spent other three hours trying to fix this situation with no luck. I created an USB Lion boot (with a lot of problems due to Mac OS X bugs and lacks of documentation) and when after I started the installation on the SSD disk I obtain another magnificent error message "Can't download the additional components to install Mac OS X". After that moment the disk became invisible for the installer and I stopped trying.

Answer 1

Since I cannot directly comment on your question (too little reputation) I'll do it this way by answering it (I know that this is not a real answer, so please forgive me). I'll just cover the supplement of your question.

I'm using a Samsung SSD 840 PRO in my MacBook Pro (Late 2011 model) without any problems. When installing the SSD I had the same problems as you described, namely "Can't download the additional components to install Mac OS X" during the installation process. For me it helped to download the Mountain Lion installer (or use a copy on another mac) and build the USB disk with the DMG file that is contained in the Mountain Lion installer (this should also work with the Lion installer I guess). Here it is described how it works.

The reason why this is working is that the USB stick contains all of the necessary data to install (Mountain) Lion whereas the solution given by Apple misses a lot of files that have to be downloaded from the web at the time of installation and the the download failed for me somehow. I'm not sure how you build your USB stick but if you used the way suggested by Apple you should give the other way of doing it a try.

Answer 2

That's the same drive as mine, although I have an early 2011 mbp, and it works brilliantly, however I don't think your laptop is SATA 3. On paper a SATA 3 drive will work on SATA 2 connections and just work slower, however there are bound to be some compatibility issues from time to time.

If yours came with the USB adapter, you could try recreating a bootable partition on it that way, and installing Lion on it and see if that boots, if so, install the drive internally and see if it still boots.

Answer 3

I have an early 2008 MBP with specific HD requirements. I think the late 2008 MBP may have the same ICH8-M AHCI SATA controller. If that is not the case, please disregard the rest of my answer.

That chip is capable of 3.0 Gb speed, but was shipped with 1.5 Gb speed. The flasher they came up with to change this destroyed the ATAPI bridge for the early optic drive so it was never released for that model.

I have read elsewhere that my Early model will only accept up to a 320 Gb 5400rpm HD or a 250 7500rpm HD because of this. You may have success installing the OS using the SSD as an external HD on a different machine but there is a good chance it will have frequent hangs once placed back in your laptop (if indeed it has the same chip).

I would do some research to see which SSD is known to work in that model and also check if Apple released a flasher for that exact model. I know I had a hard time finding out why my 640 Gb HD upgrade would never work properly. I've also wondered if clipping the controller chip for the optic drive. Running the Apple flasher for that chip and then resoldering the optic drive would work but I'm too poor to try.