Ok, so I have a MacBook that no longer works with OS X. We have tried restoring, fresh installs and everything to no avail. It will boot, but not consistently and not well. It can't really do anything without crashing. So I decided to install Linux. I went with elementary OS because it's my favorite. I inserted a EFI boot USB of elementary, and installed elementary by replacing current OS. Now when I restarted, it went directly to grub command line. It won't boot into elementary and doesn't recognize my harddrive In boots
Options. And when I try to boot a live install disk of elementary (both USB and DVD) it will got to he point where I click install OS and when I select that it just goes black. Do you have any ideas what I could do. I can't get OS X running! I need to have Linux, and I really want elementary!

Sounds to me like the hardware may have a problem. In which case Linux is no fix!

Do you know why it won't run OSx?

No I don't I just figured it was planned obsolescence on the software. Could it be a bad harddrive or something's.

Could definitely be a bad hard drive, bad memory or just about anything else.

I am not a Mac user, but if you can boot to the install media for Linux, then you should be able to boot to some sort of rescue CD and run memtest for the memory and smartctl on the drive.

Unfortunately I can't boot Linux boot I did boot OS X live boot cd.

Ask around to see if it has any diagnostic tools on it, should be something useful.

Does it use an intel CPU or is it one of the older ones with whatever it was they had?

I would surely suspect memory or hard drive first though.

It is a MacBook 2008 and appears to be Intel CPU

If intel CPU then you can test memory with memtest86. The linked page has free bootable CD/USB downloads.

For testing the hard disk I think Gparted live should have the tools you need (but I am not sure what partition scheme Apple uses).

I was able to log into Mac live install disk. From there I used the partition editor and erased the non functional Linux install. Now I am able to boot into Linux. What should I do from there?

That is confusing to me... do you mean that you can boot into the USB Linux installer?

In any event, what you should do is run the memory test for at least a couple of hours, and run some sort of tests on the hard drive, smartmontools from Gparted live, or something else.

Some of those may be on the USB installer you already have, or you can get them from the links above.

But you need to have some confidence that the memory and hard drive are good before doing anything else.

Yea I wasn't able to boot to the Linux install drive but after I went into mac live and used its partition editor to format the hard drive, I inserted the install cd and it loaded. Apparently I did something wrong in the install. How do I install it correctly?Apparently it is a special process on Mac.

I'm sorry about the bad communication on my end. I kinda hit a brick wall and didn't know what to do. I am currently trying to install elementary again as a test. If not I can do what I did before and try testing everything. (I already started install before I heard back from you) Does anybody have an idea how to install elementary on a MacBook without OS X. I have tried askubuntu links but they were no help at all!!!

Sorry, I had to step out for a while.

I have read that installing to a Mac is a little different, and I also have never installed with EFI, so I can't help much with that other than to direct you to search for more help - and I'll ask anyone with the necessary skills to step in here at this point.

Good luck!

Thank you very much astrogeek

Yea, if anyone knows anything about Mac computers and Linux I could use some help! How can I get people with that knowledge to join this thread?