OS X Install question

[Dazzla]

I was playing around with some of the system files, specifically extras.rsrc. It was just my luck when the finder crashed when I was renaming it and it couldn't restart. Me being the newb that I am restarted the mac and found it just went to a blue screen, no OS.

I tried booting from the OS X CD, but that threw up a kernel panic, I tried booting from the OS 9 CD to see if I could install that onto the hard drive and boot. That wouldn't install unless I formatted. I didn't want to because I had some freshly done college assignments just done which I couldn't afford to lose.

The software restore disks also wouldn't work because it said that the img on the CD wasn't a valid image.

In the end I had to format and install OS 9, at which point to my horror the OS X CD decided to boot.


Now I know this probably wasn't the best way to go about things but is there a way to get the system back up and running in this case without formatting?

Btw, I'm on OS X only.

 

[fryke]

It's better to have two partitions. You can keep a small operating system on the second one, for example Mac OS 9.1, but you can also have OS X there (just delete all unnecessary apps after installing). A 2 GB partition should be enough. Then you can use that to solve problems. Partitioning, of course, means reinstalling all over again.

A second option is BootCD (you'll find it on versiontracker.com), which lets you create a bootable Mac OS X CD with utilities on it. For example, you have a Terminal there, which is very handy if you want to fix things.

 

[rezba]

before playing with .rsrc, you should first try this game : fsck
and some other very simple rules.
OS10 isn't OS9. You can play with, but you gotta know the rules. And the rules are different.
Maybe that's why the guys in Cupertino called it X.