Help!!

[dazzer21]

I have just purchased an older iMac (hurrah for eBay!) to replace a machine that died, and I seem to have made a complete hash of it and now I'm a little in the lurch!!! It's an 8,1 machine (2008 Core 2 Duo) and I bought it to work alongside another 8,1 I already have (not the dead one - that's gone), only this 'new' one has more RAM and a larger drive. I bought it on the understanding that it was running 10.5 Leopard (same as my current iMac).

At the same time, I bought a new external drive which I set up as a Time Machine drive after copying all my work files from my other machine onto the Mac - ~500GB including other files etc I also put on. So - I have a Time Machine backup of the whole 1TB drive and as a result of that, have reconfigured my other iMac to make better use of its resources as it has a much smaller drive (320GB as opposed to the new one's 1TB).

At this point let me say that the reason I use an older iMac is because 'it just works' - I don't need bells and whistles upgrades - yes, I do some heavy Photoshop work quite regularly, but I've never had to wait excessively for it to do its stuff... Anyway:

My problems start here. It's not running 10.5, it's running 10.6. I discovered that when recently running Disk Utility, where it failed to complete the disk verification. So my intentions - re-boot from the supplied 10.5 DVD (with all fingers crossed), wipe the drive and completely restore from Time Machine.

Upon preparing for this, I had a music CD in the drive which, upon ejecting, 'pinged' the DVD drive and, although the CD came out, after a little coaxing, I don't trust it and therefor the iMac no longer has a usable DVD drive. On top of this, I have a LaCie external USB DVD drive that the machine will not recognise!!

So, to re-cap - I need to attend to an 'affected' (I don't want to say 'damaged' at this point in time) hard drive. I have a machine that is running a version of OS X newer than the version I have on the supplied disks. I don't have a DVD drive that I can use to boot from. I'm stuck. Help!

 

[aicul]

Doing disk utility on 10.6 iMac with 10.5 system disks should not be an issue.

But not having a CD drive to use the 10.5 system disk is your real issue.

See so many "broken" items... are you sure you want to persist ?

 

[gr8tfly]

If I take it correctly, you have another iMac with a functional optical drive? If so, use Disk Utility to make a bootable partition on your external HDD, or a USB flash drive. Then use DU to Restore from the disc to either the HDD partition or USB flash drive. Of the two, the HDD should be faster, of course.

The device HDD or flash drive needs to have been originally partitioned using the GUID table scheme, then create a partition of say, 10GB, and format is using Mac OS Extended (journaled). Once that's done, use the Restore tab and select the DVD volume as the source and the new 10GB partition as the destination. If I remember, that was back when there's an option to "erase destination" first. If so, then check the box (enable). This will enable block copy.

One complete, you should be able to boot using the external device. Easiest way I like to use is startup holding OPT, which will present all bootable partitions. Starting up this way, you don't change the default – so when you are done, you can just restart normally and not worry where it's booting from.

Hope I understood your situation and was able to help!

Note: In Disk Utility, Partition tab, you will see an Options... button. Click that to ensure you are partitioning using GUID table scheme. After that, it's pretty normal disk partitioning (or not, in the case of 8 GB flash drive, which should be big enough as a single partition.

 

[dazzer21]

Thanks for your input so far. There has been a development since but it still doesn't solve the problem. I had automatically resigned myself to the fact that the external DVD was broken. However, I've tried it on my other 10.5 machine and it works! Trying it again in the 10.6 Mac, it's dead. I have tried running the keyboard and mouse from all the USB ports on the machine and all are functioning OK. I'm going to see if I can find drivers for it so I'll see how I get on with that. Otherwise, I'll have to look at your solutions...