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Installing Snow Leopard -Mac won't boot from disc?

N

Nitromaster

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 7, 2007
334
0
Ireland.
Hi
Basically, with my Leopard installation i have a problem where it fails to boot up likely due to a previous unexpected power cut. From googling the issue it seems like the only solution anyone has had to the same problem is to re-install.

However I've lost my Leopard system discs.

I booted into my Bootcamp Windows installation and installed the latest drivers from the Snow Leopard disc which i recently purchased (and came today)
This gave me the option to read files (and presumably copy) from the mac partition but no delete function.

I have two problems here:
1. I only have 2.61GB free on the mac partition, Snow Leopard requires at least 5GB. Since I can't boot into OS X and Windows can't write to the partition i can't delete any files.
2. My mac won't boot the Snow Leopard DVD for installation. I hold C while booting and it has no effect. It does however run the Hardware test if i hold D while booting.

I have an external drive i could probaly make enough room on to back up my entire osx partition for a totally clean re-install.

However this requires some sort of access to the drive/write capabilities. Maybe something like bootable linux?
And any idea why my disc won't boot? (even if i had enough space for a install...that would be a bit pointless if i can't get the disc to boot)

Thanks for any help with this!
 
robbieduncan said:
Well then it should (obviously) boot fine. If it did then you could use the Terminal on the boot DVD to copy all your data off to an external drive.
Click to expand...

I know. It's pretty weird it won't. I've tried 10+ times with no luck.
What's even stranger is it will boot the Hardware Test from it (with D) but won't boot the proper installation part.
 
Hi, i've had the same problem, but it's a little different,
i have recently had the "spinning beach ball of death" and
googled how to fix the problem and i found out that i just
had to reinstall snow leopard. but when my mac went to boot
up in stayed on the white screen with the black apple in
the middle and wont load or anything
PLEASE HELP!!!
 
Nitromaster said:
It's a retail disc bought from the Apple Online Store.
Click to expand...

Nitromaster said:
I know. It's pretty weird it won't. I've tried 10+ times with no luck.
What's even stranger is it will boot the Hardware Test from it (with D) but won't boot the proper installation part.
Click to expand...

As far as I know, the retail disks don't have the Hardware Test on them (as that is specific to each model of Macintosh), so you're contradicting yourself here. Are you sure you're using a retail disk? Is it grey or does it have a picture of a Snow Leopard on a white background on it?

jW
 
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