please help!

[jay1111]

i have a 17" powerbook, and last night i was having some problems with software not opening, i've had the same problem before on another mac and have just reinstalled the osx that was on that mac. So i have just reinstalled tiger on the powerbook making sure it kept the old system folder and software, but it said that it couldnt continue because of an error! the problem i have now, is that when i try again to install tiger, i cant select a destination for tiger as there is no image of my hard drive!!!

is there anything i can do to solve this? i'm not bothered about losing things as i didnt have anything worth backing up on it, but i could really do with some help on this one!

thanks!

jay

 

[CanadaRAM]

Wecome to MR.

First off: please make your thread titles descriptive of the content of your post. This would be the 2,391st thread entitled "please help!"

Secondly: You need to isolate what the error is on the installer before proceeding. Unplug all USB and Firewire periherals. If you installed any third party RAM, remove it and return your machine to stock condition.
Boot from the OSX DVD and choose Disk Utility from the top menu rather than proceeding into the installer.
Does the icon of the hard drive appear on the left? If not, you have a hard drive issue that should probably go in for warranty service.

If it does appear, select it then do a Repair Disk. Make note of anything it reports having repaired. Then do a Repair Permissions.

Then try your Archive and Install again.
If it errors out again, make not of the exact error message.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[jay1111]

thanks trevor,
yeh, sorry, i should have made the title to the thread better.

i've just repaired the disk using "disk utilities" and a window came up saying...

"disk utility stopped repairing HD because the following error was encountered:
The underlying task reported failure on exit.


and on the main screen in red it says... "invalid extent entry" "volume check failed"


would you understand what this would mean?
thanks again for your help,

jay

 

[CanadaRAM]

The data structure on your hard drive is well and truly @#$^ed, to the extent that Disk Utility can't repair it. You can either -- get DiskWarrior, the all time champion data structure repair tool, and see if DW will fix it, or if you truly don't have any data you're afraid of losing, Erase the drive and start reinstalling from scratch.

You will lose one authorization on any iTunes music store tracks you have bought, you will lose your address books and historical emails and browser bookmarks, plus you will have to pull out your software CDs and serials and reinstall all 3rd party software from scratch.

The underlying cause, however, may be that your hard drive mechanism is going south. So it may repear this same episode at any point in the future. You want to deal with THAT possibility before your warranty expires, so if you have access to an Apple service centre, you might want to establish your problems now in the service records, before you reinstall.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[iEdd]

Sorry that this isn't 100% on topic:
I've never done archive+install. Does it put all your files back where they were? Or does it put them in an 'old system' folder or folder like that?

 

[jay1111]

thanks trevor,

how would i erase the drive and put tiger back on? i dont have anything on the power book as i move most of my things to my G4 every night.

thanks,

jay