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please help with powerbook problem

R

rwm514

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 30, 2008
54
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I bought a couple of used powerbooks one for home and one for my office. The office machine is a 15 in 1.67 ghz 512 ram model with a 80gb HD. It came with a fresh install of leopard but Im thinking it must have been done wrongly because it is showing a full startup disk message and zero kb available. It is running but very crippled. I tried to reinstall leopard but it wont seem to let me, "cant use leopard disc as startup". Is there a way to erase the hd so I can reinstall? I went to disk utility and it verified OK. Any direction would be great thx
 
rwm514 said:
It is a original apple disk, "Mac OS X Leopard Install DVD"
Should I attempt to erase the hd?
Click to expand...

You wanted to do it, then yes, try. Be sure to backup all the data you want from the PowerBook (PB), as erasing the HDD will wipe the data off it.

And again, what colour is that DVD? If it is grey, you might not be able to use it for installing Mac OS X. And if it is an Upgrade DVD, you need to have a prior installation of Mac OS X 10.4 on it.
 
spinnerlys said:
You wanted to do it, then yes, try. Be sure to backup all the data you want from the PowerBook (PB), as erasing the HDD will wipe the data off it.

And again, what colour is that DVD? If it is grey, you might not be able to use it for installing Mac OS X. And if it is an Upgrade DVD, you need to have a prior installation of Mac OS X 10.4 on it.
Click to expand...

It is purple and black. I dont have the 10.4 original discs, but I might have a spare set at home. It wont seem to let me erase as the volume Format selection is grayed out.
 
It seems like nothing is working because the disc is showing zero kb available. I cant even drag and object and throw it in the trash to free space up. Should I put the install disc in and restart it?
 
rwm514 said:
It is purple and black. I dont have the 10.4 original discs, but I might have a spare set at home. It wont seem to let me erase as the volume Format selection is grayed out.
Click to expand...

If it does not say "Upgrade" on the DVD, then it is most likely a Retail version.

Have you selected the Macintosh HD (red 2) entry in Disk utility or the one above in the tree (blue 1)? Have you tried the partitioning tab, if "blue 1" is selected?

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Click to expand...
 
Neither one, blue or red will allow me to erase. I havent tried partitioning. Should I?
 
rwm514 said:
Neither one, blue or red will allow me to erase. I havent tried partitioning. Should I?
Click to expand...

You are doing all of this while booted from the Leopard DVD? If not, then you will not be able to erase the Macintosh HD volume, as you currently are booting from the Macintosh HD volume, as Mac OS X resides there.
 
spinnerlys said:
You are doing all of this while booted from the Leopard DVD? If not, then you will not be able to erase the Macintosh HD volume, as you currently are booting from the Macintosh HD volume, as Mac OS X resides there.
Click to expand...

Im not booted from the leopard disk, should I put it in and then try to restart?
 
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