External Disc Drive Fails During OS X Install - Now Grey Screen With "?" Folder

[aclasschris]

Hey guys, I'm new to the forum but have been a Mac user for the last 11 years. Yesterday I was attempting to reinstall OS X Tiger on a MacBook Pro with a broken disc drive.

We connected an external disc drive, got the installation going and all seemed well. About 20 minutes in the disc drive appeared to lose power and the installation process froze. We shut the machine down and tried to run it again.

Now I'm getting a grey screen with a number of different icons appearing. On some attempts at a restart I will get the Apple logo with the loading ring underneath it. The disc drive will appear to be working and then it will stop and I get either a circle with a diagonal line running through it or a folder with a question mark on it.

I'm not sure if it's the disc drive itself that is failing to communicate with the machine or the the computer no longer knows to run from the start disc. I have the system backed up on Time Machine but that appears useless until I can reinstall OS X. We've made about 30 attempts at this and it doesn't seem to be working.

If anyone has encountered something similar or knows a work around, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

 

[cambookpro]

When I was installing a Tiger update a few years back, my machine kernel panicked and as a result couldn't get past the grey screen when you booted. Sounds a similar-ish problem.

Unfortunately the only thing I could do was put it into Target Disk Mode and use that to wipe the HD and reinstall Tiger as it didn't ever get far enough to boot from the install DVD. I couldn't find any other way Thank goodness for backups!