Leopard Installation Problem - Source Media Damaged

[nonfictional]

Hiya,
I recently bought a power mac g5, and a copy of Leopard.
I put the disc in to install and because I bought the machine second hand I decided to do a clean install and format the drive, everything seemed to be going fine until I got a message saying the source media was damaged. I tried to install, four further times. I cleaned the disc and still at around 26 mins left to go in the installation it was saying the source media was damaged.

I took the copy of leopard back to the apple store and they swapped it for another copy. Again, it said that the source media was damaged.

The machine it late 2004 2.5 dual G5 with 4gb ram - thinking it may be a problem with the drive itself (perhaps it's getting on) I decided to replace the drive with my DVD-R/W from my PC. (which, incidently is also made by Sony). Nothing happened. It wouldn't even read the disc. So I carefully replaced the other drive... any ideas?

i'm kinda gutted, because now there is not operating system on it, and I no longer have the original system discs

[richard.mac]

when i tried to reinstall Tiger on my MacBook Pro after a few problems it wouldnt finish even though the install media was fine. it turned out to be a RAM issue. the RAM was replaced on the spot and the install succeeded.

i would try running a hardware test. boot from your first grey install DVD while holding D and do an extended hardware test. if any errors show report them to Apple support. do you still have Apple Care?

[nonfictional]

Leopard comes with 90 days of apple care. I don't have the original system discs anymore. The machine has had a RAM upgrade. Is leopard hardware fussy?

[tyr2]

Does the DVD verification complete ok? i.e. the step that runs before the install starts. That should read all the blocks from the disk to check they're readable.

Regarding using the PC DVD drive, did you check that the 'Slave/Master/Cable Select' jumper was set correctly?

[nonfictional]

Yeah, the data verification completed okay, there was no problems there whatsoever.
I've tried installing several times with different problems - sometimes I get the message "cannot locate db handle 1 (then 2 -9 ) and sometimes it says it cannot complete the installation because it cannot locate the mediafiles pkg.
I bought this copy of leopard - can I install tiger and upgrade from there? do you think that will help?

[richard.mac]

have you run the hardware test? boot from the Tiger install DVD holding D.

[nonfictional]

I borrowed my friends installation dvds (As I no longer have mine) and it turned out 2 sticks of RAM were a bit dodgy - so I popped them out and tried again - everything installed Perfectly.

Thanks for all your help.

Fantastic!

Anthony

[richard.mac]

I borrowed my friends installation dvds (As I no longer have mine) and it turned out 2 sticks of RAM were a bit dodgy - so I popped them out and tried again - everything installed Perfectly.

Thanks for all your help.

Fantastic!

Anthony

Cool! i thought it was a RAM issue as soon a i read the title ;)

also if you lost your install DVDs or they were not included in the sale be aware that Leopard does not include iLife '08 or an iWork '08 trial. they are pre-installed on new Macs and come on the grey install DVDs which is why its always important to keep them. for a Power Mac its most probably iLife '06, an iWork '06 trial and maybe some other bundled software. so if you do an erase and install of Leopard you will only get the core software which does not include iLife... but it does include iTunes though.

so if you havent already try and do either an upgrade or archive and install over Tiger to keep iLife or if youve already erased and installed Leopard buy iLife '08 or try and get the grey install DVDs from the seller (or try and and find them if you lost them ;)).