How to reformat a mac that is crashed?

[lyphe]

Hi guys,

Hoping you can help an apple neophyte.

My wifes mac pro froze up on her today ( half black screen ... top flickering ... tried rebooting ... now only gets as far as a grey apple logo screen with missing pixels everywhere ). She took her hdd to the apple store today where they did a disc repair, but it's still doing the same thing now at home.

So I'd like to either try:

1) reformatting her dead hdd or
2) change her boot drive to an external and format that one.

She is using snow leopard.

Other than knowing where the 'on' button is - i have no idea about macs

Any help or guidance is HUGELY appreciated and thank you in advance.

Phil

 

[satcomer]

Here is how to do a Fresh install of Snow Leopard.

Plus consider getting IMHO the best disk utility for the Mac called Disk Warrior. Plus if it can fix this drive, don't use that drive as a boot drive.Just use it as a scratch drive since it has failed once. Then get a new drive and do the clean install.

 

[lyphe]

Thx ... I'll give that a look.
Cheers!

 

[lyphe]

ok ... NEW problem.

Any suggestions on how to open the disk drive to be able to insert the snowleopard cd? tried a few of the things I could find on the net but none worked. Tried holding left mouse key at chime ... she also has no small hole to allow removal of the drive.

any additional thoughts appreciated ...

 

[mmulin]

ok ... NEW problem.

Any suggestions on how to open the disk drive to be able to insert the snowleopard cd? tried a few of the things I could find on the net but none worked. Tried holding left mouse key at chime ... she also has no small hole to allow removal of the drive.

any additional thoughts appreciated ...

The small hole is there on the actual drive unit but your likelyness to hit it through the aluminium mesh is quite low. In the worst case, you might have the open the MP.

Usually, it should work starting up the machine holding down the Alt key, at the boot loader hit the eject key. Note, the boot loader is quite slow. So, have patience operating it. Eventually the drive should slide out. From my experience holding down the eject key a bit longer works better than just giving it a tap alone.