At work here (college computer lab) we have a bunch of white iMacs, that are about 3.5 years old. One of them, the HD died a few weeks ago and now this second one I'm not sure what's going on with.
They're all set to dual boot Leopard and Win XP. On this machine XP kept blue-screening at boot, so I went into Leopard and ran Boot Camp Assistant and nuked the XP partition. That worked fine. I then tried splitting the drive in half again.
Kernel panic.
Reboot. Login.
Kernal panic.
Repeat process.
Kernel panic.
Boot off Leopard disc, run Disk Utility, partition drive, seems to work fine. Try to install Leopard, as soon as it tries to write to the disc, kernel panic.
Boot off Leopard disc, run Disk Utility, partition drive again. Run 7-pass full erase, assuming the HD is messed up, to see if it can write to all the sectors. Go home with it running overnight.
Come in this morning, all 7-passes ran, but on the last step, "mounting drive," it kernel panicked.
Reboot again, try one last time to just install Leopard. As soon as it tries to write to the disc, kernel panic.
I'm assuming the drive is messed up, but then how could it do a 7-pass wipe successfully?
Suggestions please?
And for those of you working at educational institutions, be aware that Apple offers four-year AppleCare instead of 3-year for an extra fee. I learned this AFTER this iMac order, or else we'd still be covered.
They're all set to dual boot Leopard and Win XP. On this machine XP kept blue-screening at boot, so I went into Leopard and ran Boot Camp Assistant and nuked the XP partition. That worked fine. I then tried splitting the drive in half again.
Kernel panic.
Reboot. Login.
Kernal panic.
Repeat process.
Kernel panic.
Boot off Leopard disc, run Disk Utility, partition drive, seems to work fine. Try to install Leopard, as soon as it tries to write to the disc, kernel panic.
Boot off Leopard disc, run Disk Utility, partition drive again. Run 7-pass full erase, assuming the HD is messed up, to see if it can write to all the sectors. Go home with it running overnight.
Come in this morning, all 7-passes ran, but on the last step, "mounting drive," it kernel panicked.
Reboot again, try one last time to just install Leopard. As soon as it tries to write to the disc, kernel panic.
I'm assuming the drive is messed up, but then how could it do a 7-pass wipe successfully?
Suggestions please?
And for those of you working at educational institutions, be aware that Apple offers four-year AppleCare instead of 3-year for an extra fee. I learned this AFTER this iMac order, or else we'd still be covered.