I messed up now I need help!

[supercooled]

Ok, I have a Mac Pro and a MBP and upon the release of Leopard, I wanted to upgrade my Tiger to Leopard on my MBP so I came across this tutorial:

http://gwhiz.wordpress.com/2006/09/21/installing-leopard-from-dmg/

That worked fine. Fast forward to my Mac Pro. I tried reinstalling OS X because I wasn't happy with all the clutter only to discover my OEM disc is no good and scratched up somewhere on the disc and will not complete. Here's where bad turns to worse; my partition is all fubar'd. I've erased everything on my OS drive and now I can't even boot up with the OEM disc. I don't see anything on screen although the monitor light indicates it's actually booted up but I don't see one iota except a black screen. Is there a way to boot into safe mode in OS X to direct the DOS/BIOS (PC terms) to where the Leopard image is? I have a Leopard DMG file on a Firewire Drive.

Thanks

 

[melchior]

your mac won't boot off of an image, but if you can use another computer to image the leopard dmg to the firewire drive, you could boot and install it this way.

you can try booting into 'safe mode' by holding down the shift key at startup
i don't think you will have much luck with this though

you can also try booting into single user mode holding down the keys command + s
this way you can see what the error is os loading is shown on screen in verbose, and if you can get to the prompt it is possible to mount your firewire disk and copy anything across, if that's what you want to do.

 

[supercooled]

Turns out my keyboard won't even detect. I don't think there are any operating system, rudimentary or otherwise because the USB keyboard doesn't detect. Should I use SuperDuper to image the OS X on my MBP onto a SATA and use that as my main drive in the MP?

 

[melchior]

Turns out my keyboard won't even detect. I don't think there are any operating system, rudimentary or otherwise because the USB keyboard doesn't detect. Should I use SuperDuper to image the OS X on my MBP onto a SATA and use that as my main drive in the MP?

i would do something similar, yes.