Macbook late-2008 and Samsung SSD 830: what happened

macbook prossd

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.

Best Answer

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.