Do you like taking backups, cleaning hard drives or installing operating systems? Many of us are geeks so a lot of us answer "YES". But I would never say I could laugh doing that. But I did! I am going to tell you a story of me trying to reinstall Mac OS X.
I was asked for a favor to back up data, delete everything and install new OS X on a Mac Book Pro laptop. The first part went pretty smoothly. I got stuck for a while on cleaning the laptop. Not only because I am new to the Apple technology ...
I quickly searched the internet and found instructions how to do that. I inserted the original DVD disk with Mac OS X and restarted the laptop. Magic keys were pressed during the booting and Mac tools were supposed to be loaded from the DVD disk so I could delete the system from the hard drive. The DVD drive enthusiastically creaked a few times. I went to the kitchen for glass of water. And when I was back, the screen was black. I waited a few more minutes, nothing changed so I tried pressing different keys with no luck. Fine. Let's restart it and try again.
This time I was there next to the laptop for the whole time. Reading the DVD disk was going fine until some point when the screen went black. Restart.
The internet help me so many times so did not hesitate. I found out that I should try different key combinations to boot from DVD. Ok. That should help. I tried them, but got the same result (black screen) or the system started from the hard drive - the key combination did not work. Restarts, restarts ...
Uncle Google showed me how to reset PRAM and SMU. Guess what. Black screen. Restart.
I spent more time on searching through the internet and I found this post https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1988137?start=0&tstart=0. For some reasons, in some cases the backlight of the display does not work when booted from a DVD disk. It works fine when it starts normally from hard drive, but not from DVD. The only solution that worked for me was ...
... to light the display up with a flashlight. Then I could at least see what was presented on the screen.
I laughed and laughed a lot.
With some difficulties, I could even navigate in the installation wizard. Thank you Apple for a wonderful evening with a flashlight :)