Circle with line through it when booting macOS Snow Leopard or Leopard installers on MacBook

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Level 1

4 points

Circle with line through it when booting macOS Snow Leopard or Leopard installers on MacBook

hello

i have a macbook a1181 that was unbootable. i reformated the hard drive and tried to boot from a snow leopard installer. that did not work so i tried a leopard installer. that also did not work. i also tried burning iso's from the internet archive in case my installer was bad. also did not work. it always displayed a circle with a line thru it when i tried to boot from them. i don't know why. does anyone know why this could be happening?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: i can't install os x snow leopard on a macbook. show's circle with line thru it on boot

Earlier Mac models

Posted on Nov 10, 2025 11:45 AM

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Answer 1

augustus177 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 10, 2025 2:16 PM in response to augustus177

update: putting it in verbose mode reveled that it had something to do with the flash drive i was using. i will try a different flash drive and update.

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Answer 2

augustus177 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 13, 2025 4:51 PM in response to Servant of Cats

it has a copyright date of 2007 and using a different flash drive did help. it can only run up to os x 10.7.5, unfortunately. Thanks for the support.

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Answer 3

Nov 13, 2025 12:20 PM in response to augustus177

A1181 could be any of eight different MacBook models that Apple released between May 2006 and May 2009. Every one of these models can run Snow Leopard, although they vary greatly as to minimum and maximum OS versions.

Note that the Model ID is more useful for distinguishing between these eight models, but even there, Apple reused model IDs a couple of times.

All of them should have come with optical discs for reinstalling the original OS (be that Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard) if needed.

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Answer 4

Allan Jones

Level 9

77,648 points

Nov 13, 2025 10:43 AM in response to augustus177

See:

Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

noting the requirement to rename the flash drive under the section, "Connect and rename a USB flash drive"

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