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MacBook clean install help

B

Biaxident

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi
I bought a new MacBook just before Christmas and up until a few weeks back it has been fine. About a day after the latest Leopard update, my macbook froze and hasnt been able to boot since. All it showed was the Apple logo and the spinning gear and would not boot into Leopard. I left it for about an hour once, and it just kept spinning, and nothing. I tried shift I think it was to get into safe mode and it wouldnt. So I dug out my boot CD's, (It came installed with tiger, but came with the Leopard update disc) and tried to install Leopard again, which failed. So I then tried to install Tiger in the hope of later upgrading back to Leopard, and about half way through the install I got a message saying " there were errors installing the software". 😕

So is there anyway I can go about totally cleaning the HDD and installing OS X from scratch? Im very new to Mac and any help would be appriecated.

Thanks in advance.
 
Maybe your Hard Disk has some problems.

These are my suggestions:
Run the Apple Hardware Test from you MacOSX install Disc, to verify nothing else is causing any problem.

Then use disk utility again and Erase the disc using MacOSX Journaled Case Sensitive format.

Then try to install MacOSX with your discs.

If any of these doesn't work, try hooking up another bootable MacOSX Hard Disk to your mac and when it boots hold down the option key to select it.

And try Disk Utility on you HDD with the problem.

Or if you have another Mac, or a friend who does, boot your mac holding the T key to start in Target Disk Mode, and connect it to your friend's mac with a firewire cable and the hard disk will show up on the desktop as an external firewire HDD.
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Last edited:
This happened when I first purchased my mac mini 3 years ago with my very first software update.

I had to take it in to the mac repair guy. He had it fixed in less than a half-hour.
 
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