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macbook air snow leopard installation problem

J

jle2

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 30, 2009
5
0
hey everyone,

i have a macbook air and just bought snow leopard. while i was trying to install it (through the use of the optical drive of my mac mini), a message came up...

"the disk "macintosh HD" needs to be repaired

go to the computer with the mac OS X install DVD, open 'remote install mac OS X' (located in the utilities folder in the app folder) and follow the onscreen instructions for restarting your computer using the DVD

when the mac OS X installer opens, follow the onscreen instructions to install mac OS X. during the installation, the installer repairs the disk automatically"

... what does this mean? i'm worried about losing files on my macbook air (and do not use time machine) so should i be backing my files up? if someone could help it would be greatly appreciated. i'm pretty stuck and am dying to try out the new OS X

thanks in advance for any help given!
 
Have you tried to upgrade the mini using that disk?

I know there's been a handful of bad installation disks out there, maybe you have one.

There's no real issue installing on MBA, but I used a superdrive, I didn't try the remote install, but there's no reason that I know of than it couldn't be used.
 
got my disk this morning,

not had chance to install yet.

Does it give u the option to zero the drive if you use remote install?
 
It means it is going to do a typical check of the drive and filesystem and repair any faults. This is no different than any other time you do a disk repair from the OS X DVD.

Also, you should always backup your data.

Last thing, if you have the ability, make an image of the DVD and restore it to a USB drive. Installation is much faster.
 
thanks for the replies...

i tried the remote install but since i have a WEP-protected password network, the remote install cannot be completed (at least that's what it says when i look at the instructions)

i've never done a disk repair before? does it have anything to do with the disk utility function? this whole thing is completely foreign to me... i've never had any problems figuring out mac software before

how would you go about doing the usb installation method. i wouldn't mind making installation faster as it has been painfully slow in the past

i'm still confused about this whole message though that popped up. since i can't do the remote install, which was apple's solution, what should i do now in order to get snow leopard to work?
 
that's what i tried after the initial install failed but since i have a WEP-protected password network, the instructions state that it is not possible to install snow leopard with such a password present... would it be worth it to try and remove the password to try and install it and then put it back on? i don't know how to do this as i'm not the one who put the password on but i suppose i could try and look it up online
 
UPDATE!

i was able to successfully install snow leopard through the use of my USB drive! thanks so much to everyone for their help, it's greatly appreciated!
 
Remote Install Experience

I also have a 1st gen 80GB MBA. An initial attempt using standard DVD sharing yielded the "disk needs repair... use Remote Install Mac OS X" message. It took a few tries to get Remote Install Mac OS X to work. Thought this would be helpful to post.

1. Turn off CD DVD sharing. The first two attempts, the MBA showed the remote Snow Leopard disk after holding down the Alt key on boot, but after following directions it just wound up booting the local disk after a brief delay. Turning off CD DVD sharing seemed to fix this.
2. When actually booting off the remote disk, the minimalist grey boot-screen spins a small earth icon instead of the normal radial spinning one.
3. I disabled Airport wireless networking on both computers before starting, in order to force the faster wired Ethernet. I successfully used a USB Ethernet connection on the MBA, so wireless may have caused a one of the failures on the first two attempts. I live in a fairly dense wireless use area and connectivity occasionally is flaky.

I did a basic install and total time seemed to be less than two hours. OS X 10.6 freed up 23.8GBytes, which was very nice.
 
macbook air snow leopard installation problem

Maybe a silly question, but how can I make an image of my Installation DVD on a USB stick? I tried a straight forward copy, but that doesn't work.

I have tried the remote CD and remote installation a couple of times without any luck. Would like to try the USB stick option.

Thx
Eric
 
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