Mac help needed...

Cheekz185 · 03-18-2008, 06:56 AM

OK well im a novice to mac. 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 "restore" an image in disc utility.
So In Disk Utility I went to RESTORE, for SOURCE I put the osx leopard DVD . And for the Destination I made it the Mac HD. I figured that it would create animage 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.

Questions:

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

2. Is there anyway to view the contents of the HDD if the OS install disk is inserted?

Bugbyte · 03-21-2008, 10:09 PM

I don't understand why you tried to restore anything? Just put the Leopard disk in and run the installer.

What you did was take the image in the DVD drive and put it on the hard drive. I'm not sure if that wipes the disk or not, but I think it does.

To read the HD, boot the computer with the Leopard DVD in it. Press and hold 'C' immediately after starting. It should boot to the desktop from the DVD drive. You ought to be able to access the hard drive from that point.

zapro · 03-22-2008, 03:23 PM

Well that's bad - REALLY bad.

All you buddy's data is now gone, it's effectively wiped clean.

Boot the mac with the DVD in the drive and hold down the C-key, install normally.

// Per.

kandyman676 · 03-22-2008, 04:18 PM

I really hope you had your friend take a BACKUP before you started any of this...you just wiped his HDD.

Cheekz185 · 03-22-2008, 10:27 PM

Problem SOLVED... I just formatted the drive and installed OS X Panther. Its ok because I saved all of his data b4 i did anything. He bought a 250GB HDD and 2gb or memory. I installed everything and loaded Leopard on the new drive. Everything is good... Thanks for your help guys.

kandyman676 · 03-23-2008, 07:59 PM

No problem. Leopard seems to love a new harddrive better than trying to upgrading an existing install from my experiences.

Glad to here your friend is up and running.

Cheekz185 · 03-23-2008, 08:55 PM

I have been a PC guy for a while now. But after learning a bit about Mac I really want to get a nice new iMAc now.

kandyman676 · 03-24-2008, 08:18 PM

Hey, that's how most of us start...I use to hate hate macs when I worked in a design shop as the Windows admin and web programmer. It wasn't until the intel chip change I started to like them and actually wanted one. Actually certified for the 10.4 desktop and run an Xserve RAID at work with the rest of my 400+ Win 2k3 servers.