Re-installing Tiger

[livelikeriley]

I know it's a few weeks till Leopard comes out, but I've got a problem with my iMac and need to reinstall Tiger on it now to make it useable (certain apps choose not to launch etc...it's a mess - and out of warranty ) It came with Tiger out of the box and had not been upgraded - the problem is that I do not have the original restore disks. My fiancee' has restore disks for her iBook that include Tiger, and I have read about doing an install via firewire disk mode...has anyone ACTUALLY done this? Does it work? I called Apple and they said they would ship me new install DVDs for $30 for the iMac...which is retarded when I know leopard is coming out this month! Any help/hope?

Thanks,
Mark.

 

[macjack1]

No, you cannot use the disks from an iBook, What model iMac do you have?

How do you know you need to re-install? Have you tried creating a new account> Name it "test" and see how your apps work in that User acct? (That will tell if your problem is systemwide or limited to your User acct.) This account is just for test, do nothing further with it.

Open System Preferences >> Accounts >> "+" make it an admin account.

Let us know and we'll troubleshoot this further.

 

[livelikeriley]

I actually used to work for Apple, so I know and have tried that trick already. I don't KNOW that I need to do a re-install, but it seems the easiest way to just wipe it fresh and start over. So there is no way to extract just tiger from the discs...hmm...poo. Leopard needs to come out today!

 

[livelikeriley]

Just an update in case anyone else is ever in this situation. I was able to create a partition on my iMac and then use Pacifist to extract the Tiger system data from the iBook DVDs...there was some terminal legwork as well, but it is technically possible! Not the best solution, since I still have the non-working partition as well taking up space - but it will do as a bandaid until Apple gets Leopard out the door.

Mark.