FULL system wipe with no OS

[mungai]

Hey,
My friend recently acquired a MBP off his flat mate with windows 7 installed on it, He tried to boot a snow leopard cd through the boot up screen then holding c onto the MBP but it failed to install.
So now he can’t even allocate where he wants to install it and because it failed it doesn’t even load windows it just appears with system error after he boots the laptop

1) So I was wondering what your advice would be to do?

I thought about doing a full system wipe, then I heard you could reinstall it via connecting it to another Mac or imac in our case then reinstalling it via the imac and selecting the MBP hard drive to install it into?

2) Is this possible?
3) Also the flat mate lost the gray cds that macs come with, so would the snow leopard be ok? Or is it just a system update not a full OS?

 

[gr8tfly]

Try holding down the "opt" key on startup. You should then be able to select the Snow Leopard DVD as the boot volume.

 

[mungai]

i dunno, he said when he boots it up and tried to reinstall mac OS on it, it doesnt let him choose where he can designate the OS to. S:
but he will bring it to uni tomorrow so i will check it out further then
but thanks for your input will try it tomorrow

 

[gr8tfly]

i dunno, he said when he boots it up and tried to reinstall mac OS on it, it doesnt let him choose where he can designate the OS to. S:
but he will bring it to uni tomorrow so i will check it out further then
but thanks for your input will try it tomorrow

It's probably that the drive could have previously been reformatted/repartitioned for Windows. It needs to be a GUID partition (not MBR) formatted for Mac OS Extended (journaled). (Use Disk Utility.)

Upon starting the Snow Leopard install, wait until after you select the language. Now you can select Disk Utility from the tools/extras menu [to perform the above partitioning and formatting tasks.

 

[spinnerlys]

Your friend needs to format the HDD, as of now, only a single partition with Windows 7 is on that computer. Windows uses another file system than Mac OS X does, so you need to format the HDD with a Mac OS X file system.

MRoogle will give you plenty of threads about this.

Here are two guides:

http://guides.macrumors.com/Drives_and_Filesystems
http://macs.about.com/od/applications/ss/diskutilformat.htm

 

[mungai]

Your friend needs to format the HDD, as of now, only a single partition with Windows 7 is on that computer. Windows uses another file system than Mac OS X does, so you need to format the HDD with a Mac OS X file system.

MRoogle will give you plenty of threads about this.

Here are two guides:

http://guides.macrumors.com/Drives_and_Filesystems
http://macs.about.com/od/applications/ss/diskutilformat.htm

thanks for the guides ... but they dont really make any sense to me heh :/
but looking at the file systems, none of them are really the situation i have at the moment :/
as he cant run either windows or mac OS but i boot it up myself tomorrow and check as he was explaining to me his issue via text thanks again