Using Terminal to erase a hard disk because I cant boot from a DVD to reinstall Tiger

What happens if you hold Option at boot? Can you select the Tiger disc?

Another possible method is to force the computer to boot off the disc by selecting it in the Start Disk preference panel.

Failing all that and you're desperate to just to format the drive, easiest way would be to hook it up to another Mac in Target Disk Mode and format it.

 

You can't erase the disk you're booted from. No OS will (or, at least, should) let you do that.

You can only erase your disk when booted from some other volume - either another disk, DVD or similar.

 

Hopefully you have access to an external hard drive. Google for instructions to create a bootable, installable OSX installer image on a partition of a hard drive (you may have to borrow a recent Mac to set this up if yours is oos) and boot from the external hard drive to use Disk Utility, then reinstall.

 

I need to bump this, because this seems to have just saved me after hours of hassle.

My HD was broken. Completely. Corrupted Windows and OSX. Couldn't Paritition or Erase because "Resource Busy". Couldn't unmount the drive either because all options were faded out.

Tried to Target Disk to another computer, failed. I did the reverse and started up the other system from my computer.

So then I found this site, and tried the following command

diskutil unmountDisk /Volumes/disk0

Suddenly, I got this horrible error saying something about the disk being horribly corrupt and to do what you have to do or something to that effect. Partitioned it fine. Now I'm going to restart to see if this fixed it!

THANK YOU!!

 

Halloween is over and yet this thread has risen from the dead!