Help! Severe snow Leopard installation issues!

daniel7 · #1 September 16th, 2009, 11:07 PM

Hi, today, i got the new snow leopard and started installing it to my 20 inch imac, that was previously running OSX 10.5 (leopard).
The installation was going fine when it started raining and the power went out. I was relaxed because i knew about the new power failure feature in the snow leopard installation (supposedly it should continue installing after you turn it back on after the power failure).
So i switched my computer back on. It took about 2 minutes (way more than usual to load) and the installation screen reapeared. A window came on saying "Mac OS X can't be installed on this computer. This disc requires that Mac OS X 10.5 or later already be installed on your computer". I find this weird because i am running 10.5. on my mac. Only two options are given in this window "restore from backup" (which i dont have) and "restart". Every time i click on restart, the computer restarts and the same thing appears. I cant click on any option on the menu bar, and there is no dock, so i cant do anything, i cant even eject the cd.

The only think i can think of to fix this is to open the mac equivalent to MS's BIOS. But i dont know how to.

Please help! i dont know what to do!

co19 · #2 September 17th, 2009, 07:43 AM

Macs closest thing to a BIOS is its EFI, you might want to do some research on that.. not that smart of an idea.

What I would recommend is connecting your computer to another one and getting any important files that you want, then reformatting your computer with the installation disk. I know this seems severe, but its good to reformat here and there.

daniel7 · #3 September 23rd, 2009, 07:45 PM

I managed to fix it. In case this happens to anyone else, ill say how i did it:
While the mac is booting, right after the sound it makes when you turn it on, press and hold alt. A thingy will appear giving you the option to boot from cd or hard drive. Select but do not boot the cd and press the eject button in your keyboard. Then insert the leopard 10.5 (or any OS) and boot from that cd. I reinstalled leopard and my computer worked again.
Then i tried to install snow leopard again, but it wouldnt boot after the installation (which makes me think snow leopard sucks). So i did the same thing all over again and left my computer with OSX 10.5 installed, it works fine.

Hope it helps someone.