reinstall osX after disk wipe

tbartel · #1 April 1st, 2008, 01:01 PM

My consultant wiped the hard drive of my iMac G4 and now the os disk utility won't work to reformat the disk or reinstall the os. He wiped it on a PC (yeah, I know, but that's his world). When I boot from the osX.3.2 disk, it seems to start the os install process, but hangs when it gets to the disk format/erase part. Any ideas of how I can cure this, short of buying a new hard drive?

MisterMe · #2 April 1st, 2008, 02:12 PM

Your situation begs too many questions to ask. Suffice it to say, your consultant formatted your hard drive to a Windows-compatible filesystem. I'm betting you have no idea which OS shipped on your system. If that is the case, then you are probably best served by using a retail version MacOS X 10.4 or MacOS X 10.5 to reformat your hard drive and to install the OS.

tbartel · #3 April 1st, 2008, 02:19 PM

Shipped with os 10.2.7. I've tried using the original install/restore disk. That seems to work (i.e. it seems to go though the install) but the machine will not boot afterwards. When I try to use the OS10.3.2 disk (bought to upgrade) it just stalls as noted above. I've tried to reformat the the hard drive using that. No luck. Would 10.4 or 10.5 be any better?

**Giaguara** · #4 April 2nd, 2008, 06:36 AM

How much RAM do you have?
When you try to upgrade to the 10.3 disc, keep install with full logs open (View > full..). That will tell what it is trying to do and what fails.

tbartel · #5 April 2nd, 2008, 06:04 PM

1gb
logs open shows a blank
when try to run diskutil with 10.3 disk, get the following message
"Disk Utility started but a background process needed in disk utility did not start properly..."
Computer completely locks up.

I can run disk util from original 10.2 disk, but when I click on the disk name, disk util quits.

is there any way to reformat the hard drive from the command prompt?

eric2006 · #6 April 2nd, 2008, 06:40 PM

I'm not sure if this would be applicable, but if your consultant took the hard drive out of the Mac, he may have changed the jumper settings so that he could work on it. The jumper should be as cable select, or master.

If you can't get any OS X disk to format the drive, try reformatting from Target Disk Mode if possible.

tbartel · #7 April 2nd, 2008, 07:04 PM

how do I get to Target Disk Mode?

eric2006 · #8 April 2nd, 2008, 08:04 PM

You'll need another Mac, though a PC may work (but you can't format as HFS..).
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

Also, try running the hardware test on your original install disk.