I just can't get OSX to install

[longshadow]

I spent 8 hours trying to intall OSX. This is the extremely condensed account: I followed the instructions exactly - I'm not a mac novice.

Nothing connected to the mac. 2nd hard drive, formatted as Mac HFS extended.

In the 8 hours I managed to get one clean, working installation of OSX. Amazing, considering that half the time the installation disk was rejected by my mac, which asked me if I wanted to initialise it. The rest of the installs were buggy. The finder would restart itself every 10 seconds, or else nothing would run at all. once I got the working install I then tried to update to 10.1, big mistake. Nothing worked. I'd open an application but nothing would happen, then a warning box appeared telling me that there was a problem, and that I should re-install the software. I gave up at that point and re-formatted the 2nd hard drive I was using for this installation.

I'm very dissapointed. Does anybody have any suggestions?

 

[Jonnie13]

Tell us about your hardware setup. --What kind of machine are you using? Any PCI goodies involved? Is the 2nd drive internal and configured by the drive jumpers as slave (IDE or ATA) or master? Is the drive partitioned? Has the drive been checked for bad sectors? Is the copy of the OS X Installer disk legitimate (no accusations here, just trying to find out what's going on with your setup?)

Sorry for the 20 questions but I think more info. is needed for an accurate diagnosis and/or solution to your problem.

 

[lethe]

let the installer do a clean format. make sure you use HFS, not UFS. same thing with the 10.1 update. let it format and do a complete clean install.

maybe zap the pram?