Mac Book startup disk won't boot, HD appears fine

[stilbite]

The rule of thumb for future reference is always try to have 10% of yuour hard drive free. Running down to 1.4GB is what may be causing the problem in the first place. Do I gather you do not have an Install Tiger disc?
I am not fully sure what you are tryinmg to do with a .dmg file.
Another alternative to salvage your drive before a complete wipe is to get hold of a Fire Wire cable and another Mac.. .. boot the other Mac with the cable attaching both, boot the broken one holding down the 'T' key, this will run Target Mode and mount the Hard Drive on the other Mac, here you can run repairs, delete the folder causing the problems and hopefully get the other running again.

[KdawgX]

An update:

Everything appears to be back to normal.

I have successfully restored the backup .dmg image of the hard drive.

I found online documentation on how to actually do the restore, and the process counter intutative.

Long story short:

Drag an drop of hard drive to restore to, doesn't seem to work if you boot from the system disk in Tiger... solution: I used the yet to be installed Snow Leopard system disk to perform the restore.

Second issue: You can't restore from a read/write image. You need to convert it to a compressed or read only image.

Once I realized these two things, I was off to the races. Very scary that you can pooch this thing that easily.

I suspect archive and restore might have worked, had I not had a full hard drive.

thanks again.

[jbarley]

Originally Posted by stilbite

It seems like you have messed up the OS on you Mac.
Snow Leopard requires Leopard already installed if your upgrading if you have the full retail version then you can upgrade from Tiger. I upgraded my Leopard to Snow Leopard and it does not re-boot to a fresh install it just loads and does not require a re-boot afterwards.
I think your best course of action is to try and Archive and Install from your original Tiger disc.. this will hopefully get your OS recognized again and access to your files etc.

Snow Leopard does not require any previous operating system to be installed.
The standard upgrade version $29US or $35Can will happily install on any properly newly formatted drive on an INTEL mac.
It appears that Apple changed the rules sometime just before releasing SL, so now the only reason to buy the retail boxed set is if you need ilife, iwork, etc.

[stilbite]

jbarley.. it seems you are 100% CORRECT. I re-partitioned my MacBook 15in last night and via target mode on another MacBook installed Snow to a complete clean Hard Drive. My DVD is not reading Install Discs hence the TM option but I now have Snow running without the need for a pre-installed Leopard.