Please Help TOTALLY CLUELESS Newbie! Leopard Won't Install!

Ok, im not gonna lie, this is gonna take the strongest and best willed of nerds to NOT laugh at you. SEriously, thats all im gonna say on that subject because you asked for me to be nice.

For starters, Im surprised you've stayed on 10.3.9 for so long, Tiger itself is a big improvement, and now leopard will be a HUGE improvement. So when ya get it installed enjoy.

TO install something like leopard, what you do is... stick the disk in the computer.

While it is booting hold the C key.

the computer WILL load into an installing sort of program, this is where you choose some preferecnes and random stuff, and this is where the installation process occurs. It will take abour 1 and a half to 2 hours to install leopard, there will be a blue progress bar in a window in te middle, if that bar isnt there is means your computer isnt installing.

Travelbliss said:

I finally caved and decided to "upgrade" my current 4 year old system, going from OS X 10.3.9. I put the DVD into the computer, and the grey screen appeared. NO other prompts, nothing that would encourage me to think Leopard is installing... 3 hours later....NOTHING. I shut it off, remove the DVD, re-load....3 hours later....NOTHING. Only grey screen....I am on the verge of taking the computer into the genius bar to help this non-genius install Leopard.
Someone take pity and offer any advice. I am basically computer illiterate, so be kind, I don't know mac "lingo". Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding!!

Click to expand...

Do you happen to know the specifications of your current system? Bear in mind Leopard's minimum requirements are for a 867GHz G4 and 512MB RAM.

Or better yet, just boot your computer normally and after that insert the disc. Double-click it and select the restart and install OS X from there.

what install DVD is it? is it grey or does it have the big black X on top of the purple nebula?

Leopard installing after upgrade 10.3.9 to Mac OS X Server to Leopard taking 4+ hours

I am following the same steps I followed for my laptop to upgrade my daughter's laptop but something is amiss. My laptop is a PowerBook G4. It was 10.3.9 which will not upgrade to Leopard, so I purchased an inexpensive copy of Mac OS X Server, installed it to bring it to a 10.4 OS. From there Leopard installed painlessly.

I followed the same steps for my daughter's iBook G4, but the disk has stated "Preparing Installation" for over 4 hours now. How do I stop this installation and get the CD out? I have turned the computer off, but when it is turned back on, the CD goes right back into endless installation. How do I get the CD out of the drive? I want to go back to OS X Server! Can anyone help me?

To get the disk out, restart the system (sounds like you will have to force the shutdown and then power back up). Immediately after you get the startup chime do one of the following:

1. If you have a mouse attached, click and hold the left (or only depending on what mouse it is) button and continue to hold down until the disk ejects.

2. If no mouse is in use, do the same thing as above but using the click bar on the computer itself.

That should get the disk kicked out before it enters the loop again.

If I can make a suggestion I think that the idea you mentioned in your first post about going to a Genius Bar would be an excellent idea, making sure to take all the disks that you are trying to use with you. We would love to help you here and there are a lot of people who would be able to, it would be very difficult to since you are not familiar with a lot of the terms commonly used (which is not picking on you- everybody starts at the same point! ). You have tried to give us the info we need to help, so good job- but after reading your last post I will admit I am now thoroughly confused since now we have introduced the concept of another computer, using some version of OSX Server Edition on them etc. and we still have not determined what type of Leopard disk is being tried as was asked above.

You will pick up the terminology as time goes by but I really feel that a hands on look at your disks and computer by a Genius would be a lot more helpful right at the moment since they could just look at your stuff and would know the answers to all the questions we could fire off here- again, no offense intended.

Thank you!

I got the disk ejected and realized that my daughter's computer did not have enough memory to install Leopard, the purple disk with the large X on it. I will get the memory upgraded and try this again. The only reason I used OS X Server was that it was cheap and worked for what I needed, a platform of 10.4 or higher to get Leopard installed.

Thank you for your help! I have never had to "force" anything on my Mac, that is why I walked away from Windows operating systems a couple years ago. Problem is, I am not up to speed completely with the Mac. I hope to get there some day.

Great- glad to hear you got the disk ejected ok!

Not that it matters now since it already done, but since you do have a retail disk version of Leopard as you have described there was really no necessity of installing 10.4 to get to Leopard from 10.3.9. The retail disks will update (or replace with a fresh install which is usually best) any previous version of OSX, not just the previous one.

I only bring this up for your own knowledge and to avoid you thinking that you might have to go through the whole 10.3-->10.4-->Leopard chain if there were a problem that required you to erase the hard drive and reinstall the operating system! Just jumping right in to the Leopard installation would have some serious time advantages obviously.

Good luck with the rest of the process!