Mac help - iPhone 3G

Cheekz185 · 03-18-2008, 02:54 AM

OK well im a novice to mac. I was able to obtain Mac OSX Leopard. My friend who has a iMac G5 wanted to upgrade to the new leopard. SO i went over there today to try an upgrade the OS.

I tried to install osx leopard but it came up with errors. Anyway I was told to take the Leopard image and in disc utility to a restoer.

So In Disk Utility I went to RESTORE, for SOURCE I put the osx leopard "sparseimage" file . And for the Destination I made it the Mac HD. I figured that it would create another image file. BUT it did not, what it did was, it made the MAC HDD the Leopard Installer DVD. So now I restarted the Mac and it keeps trying to load the Leopard because it is acting as the Leopard install. While the restore was "COPYING" i saw that in FINDER under the harddrive, an icon was created called OSX Leopard install DVD.

Is there any way I can somehow fix this. I cannot even get on to the desktop.

geordisjd · 03-18-2008, 03:50 AM

Well, I never heard anything so complicated to install Mac OS X, Leopard or otherwise.

Sounds almost worse than installing Windows on Parallels.
Did you run disk aid on the G5 before trying to install? Repair the disk permissions? Probably not. Try to force-start the G5 from the Leopard install disk by holding the C key on start up. If it does, get rid of whatever you installed on the HD, run the disk utility from the DVD and try to install again (do a clean install).
Is there a lot of stuff that needs to be saved from that HD?
If the above doesn't work, you may have to connect another Mac to that poor G5 (by connecting them through their firewire ports) and start the G5 in target mode by holding its T key on restart. The G5 HD will mount on the other Mac's HD and from there, you can get rid of the mess (trash it and empty the trash) you installed and run Disk aid. Then disconnect the 2 Macs** and try to install again from the DVD.

When nothing works, you'll have to start the G5 in Target mode, save its contents to the other computer, then initialize the G5's HD to a virgin state (choose Mac OS extended format - journaled - to erase the HD).

Then you should be able to install the new OS on the drive and re-transfert the stuff from the other computer.

Good luck!*

(**) Turn off the G5 by hitting the power key before you disconnect!!!

(*) I must be joking...

Cheekz185 · 03-18-2008, 11:40 AM

Thanks for your help. But i have a feeling that by restaring the image to the HDD, i believe that it only change the system folder to the image instead of the MAC OS X system folder. I am going to try to press and hold X on startup, cuz that will force boot into Mac OS X. If not I will press and hold D - Boot from the internal hard disk if the default boot device has been set to something else.

If all else fails I will try safe boot.

geordisjd · 03-18-2008, 02:42 PM

Mac Life shouldn't be this hard. Let us know what worked.

Cheekz185 · 03-18-2008, 04:47 PM

I'm a novice wit mac how do i erase what I put on the hdd while using the install disc?

geordisjd · 03-19-2008, 02:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cheekz185

I'm a novice wit mac how do i erase what I put on the hdd while using the install disc?

Ah, man! My apologies

. I had a flashback to the 20th century, to the past millennium in fact, when starting up from the install disk (Mac Os 9) would actually mount the HD too

, and let you do whatever you wanted to it, like trashing stuff you didn't want. I know I shouldn't, but there are times I miss Mac Os 9 (and 8, and 7). Between Applescript and a few other apps, it allowed the user to tweak the system a lot more than now. Ah, the days of start-up screens, and start-up movies, and changing all your icons directly in the system. I changed the AOL turning "beach ball" into a BMW emblem

which was really entertaining in the days when connecting on dial-up with a 9,600 baud modem required more entertaining than anybody could tolerate now... Of course, there were the crashes and the restarts that would take 15 minutes, and the extension conflicts...OK, enough nostalgia.

Mac Os X doesn't let you mount the HD from the install disk. You can just run the disk utility from it.

However, starting the G5 from a Mac laptop through the firewire ports in target mode is something I've done a hundred times, and it allows you to do whatever you want to the G5's HD (even if it has no functioning system software), including trashing stuff, installing stuff, erasing the drive, etc...
Surely, if the G5 is unmountable right now, there's got to be somebody around with a MacBook or other portable Mac that you can find to save it.

Cheekz185 · 03-19-2008, 11:54 AM

What kind of Firewire cable do I need?

geordisjd · 03-19-2008, 01:16 PM

This is what I use: 6 pin to 6 pin