Dual boot 10.6 and 10.7, three beeps

[jwbphoto]

I have a brand new Macbook Pro and here is the rundown.

-I installed an OWC 240GB SSD drive as my boot
-took my 500GB factory drive and installed it in the optical drive bay using an OWC Data Doubler
-I created two partitions on the SSD and installed Lion on one partition
-Lion is running fine. I installed Snow Leopard on the second partition.
-When restarting, I can hold down the option key and see both partitions. I can boot into the Lion partition just fine, but when I try to boot into the Snow Leopard partition, it tries to boot and beeps three times.
-after reading online, it seems like it could be a RAM problem. I took out the RAM and put it back in, took out one at a time, but it still beeps when I try to boot into Snow Leopard
-ran memtest and everything checked out fine
-I reset the PRAM and SMC, repaired permissions and repaired the disk.

I guess it could be bad RAM, but the Lion partition seems to have no problem with it. Still showing 8GB in system profiler.

sorry for the length...any suggestions?

 

[Tucom]

Sounds like it's the fact the there's the dual boot setup going on that could be messing up the RAM access when trying to boot Snow Leopard. Is the dual boot setup absolutely perfectly/correctly? Does Snow Leopard boot up when in place of the Lion drive? What about switching them around?

 

[ResPublica]

Perhaps you should first install Snow Leopard, then Lion? The problem seems to be related to software, not hardware.

 

[jwbphoto]

Think I found the culprit

I omitted one potentially important point. Since I took the optical drive out, I used target disk mode to install Snow Leopard on its partition. I used a friends Macbook Pro, but I put my machine into target disk mode and ran the installer from his user account and optical drive. From a couple things I read online, it seems that Apple recommends putting the other machine in target disk mode and doing it the other way around. I guess some critical files might not have been installed? I also used a retail copy of Snow Leopard instead of my grey recovery disk, so that might be it too.

Anyway, its all kind of a moot point. I mostly wanted Snow Leopard on the machine because Final Cut Pro X wouldn't initially install on Lion, but it finally did and everything is running smoothly in 10.7 for now.

Thanks for the help though.

 

[Bear]

Your machine is newer than the retail copy of Snow Leopard. Use the restore disks it came with.

The installation will need to be done from your machine. You may need to do a net install, so look at "Remote Install Mac OS X" in Utilities.