It sounds like the USB drive doesn't have the drivers to boot the other macs. :-(
The fastest path forward is to simply erase install a basic Snow Leopard OS onto the failed macs. While this is happening, do download the 10.6.8 Combo update to your USB drive just in case it's needed.
Don't bother running the updates unless the Lion installer forces you to get to a higher version than your 10.6 installer delivered.
Once you boot into Snow Leopard - you can try again to mount the USB and execute the Lion upgrade package. I don't know if it runs well from the USB or needs to be copied to the internal boot drive.
There's a little uncertainty in my brain - so I don't want to write too much without making sure this makes sense to you.
As an alternative - you could try instead to transfer the recovery partition, but this may not be universal (include the drivers the older macs) either.
There is a step-by-step recipe here for copying any bootable volume to one file on a USB drive.
If you are curious or feel it's worth a shot, image the recovery partition from your Lion mac.
You should be able to boot from DVD and use disk utility to make an equivalent partition on the "non bootable" mac and drop the recovery data to get a minimal bootable system and avoid a full Snow Leopard install.
Unless you are familiar with Disk Utility and the steps to capture, the reinstall option might be more likely to succeed on first attempt. I certainly don't know if this partition is customized by Lion and not universal so I've made it an aside for the curious.
Run /Applications/Utilities/Console.app
and check system.log
.
Look especially for entries that say something like disk4s3: I/O error
. If you see that, then your hard drive is failing.
Since you did a re-install, I assume you have everything backed up. If not, try to cool the computer down as best you can, either by raising the fan speeds or even putting a cold pack under it, and perform a backup.
The following article has detailed instructions for how to limp the drive along or possibly restore it: Hard Drive Recovery. But if you already did a clean install and are still seeing I/O errors in the logs, it is most likely not recoverable.
Best Answer
I think that the problem is your new ram. You have upgraded with
1333MHz DDR3
, and you should use1066MHz DDR3
RAM. The problem is that the chipset does not downclock your ram to 1066MHz and when MacOS enters graphic mode, the machine freezes.The problem lies somewhere within the low performance (shared memory) graphic chip MacOS drivers. Under text mode, MacOS works perfectly. Running Apple Hardware Test and testing ram (1333MHz) also works. I have been told that Windows runs also.
If you cannot replace your new ram (it's was hard for me to find 1066MHz 4GB SO-DIMMs), you can temporary fix this problem by inserting one slow (1066MHz) DIMM (if you still have it) and one of the new 1333MHz. This will make chipset run your MBP with the least common speed, and your notebook will boot.
I have found and published a way to downclock your ram and fix this issue in this Apple Support Discusions thread. I'm quoting myself:
If you decide to take this path of flashing the SPD EPROM of your RAM, I could expand this or make a new one question, to cover in details the flash process.