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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Urgent Problem Reintalling OS X Tiger

jakob77 - Jul 12, 2006 - 7:24 am

To Whom It May Concern:

I was running OSX Tiger on my Powerbook G4 and was experiencing some performance issues. I was told a reinstall of Tiger might help. Using my disk that I got from Mac I tried a reinstall (I archived the existing system when prompted), which failed for whatever reason part way through the process.

I did not have time to attempt this again at that time and therefore asked the system to shut down.

Instead of now allowing me to reinstall, it says I do not have osx v.10.3 which is necessary to install Tiger. Also the computer will not reboot and I do not know how to access the archived system.

Please tell me which commands I need to type in when prompted on startup. Or whatever else I need to do. Right now my only options are to hold down the power and get the cmmand screen which allows me to mac-boot or shut-down or on startup i can hold the c button which runs the disk and then tells me i don't have 10.3 or it just sits there with the apple and the spinning disk.

FYI, I have the MAC 0s 9 disk with me as well, but that's it since I am travelling in Kenya.

Thank you very much for your help.

Regards,

Jacob

Thunderthud - Jul 12, 2006 - 11:33 am

The format of your hard drive has been messed up. Try the following...

Boot from your install disk and have Disk Utility (Utilitiesisk Utility) repair your hard drive. Do this as many times as it takes until no errors are reported.

Next, have Disk Utility Repair Permissions on your hard drive. Then try to reinstall the system again.

If Disk Utility can not repair the errors you will need to reformat the drive and install the system from scratch.

jakob77 - Jul 13, 2006 - 9:15 am

Thank you for your reply. The repair did not go through unfortunately. i tried multiple times and every time i get the same message:

Incorrect block count for file system.log
(It should be 33 instead of 63)
Keys out of order
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired.

Error: the underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired

I really do not want to have to reformat the hard drive, as that sounds like deleting everything on it and resetting it. I forgot to mention that i do have an external hard drive with me that has my laptop backed up from march, without tiger but with osx 10.3 or something. Could this be used to solve my problem? i have a lot of data and photos on the computer that i would hate to lose.

Please walk me through all the baby steps if possible. I am a real novice with macs.

Thank you for your help. I truly appreciate it.

Jacob

Thunderthud - Jul 13, 2006 - 9:37 am

I can't help with telling you how to do what you are suggesting but let me suggest this...

Disk Warrior may be able to accomplish what Disk Utility could not. It is a wonderful utility and is available at your Apple store, CompUSA or over the internet at www.alsoft.com. You might even be able to download it to your laptop but a CD version would be better.

Read its manual CAREFULLY AND COMPLETELY then have at trying to save your hard drive.

If you'd like I will reopen this item in case another tech can help you with your idea.

jakob77 - Jul 14, 2006 - 4:04 am

thank you for your response. seeing as i am out of the country, perhaps if i could get a full copy of tiger, i could use that, otherwise i will try disk warrior.

but please open it up to others to help, thanks again.

ishan - Jul 14, 2006 - 9:17 pm

"Keys out of order" means major directory damage. DiskWarrior might fix it, though and it's an essential app to have. You can download it (after paying for it) and install it on an internal or external bootable hard drive if you can't or don't want to burn it to CD. Then boot up with the drive which has DiskWarrior installed (make sure you have the serial number handy, you'll need it to run DW) and see if it will repair your drive. If not, I would follow the advice of others here and reinstall with the "Archive" option.

HTH and please let us know what happens. Thanks.

jakob77 - Jul 27, 2006 - 10:55 am

Thank you for your help before, but now I have a new problem.

Disk Utility somehow finally worked from the upgrade dvd. i managed to but a firewire cable in nairobi and downloaded diskwarrior to a friend's computer. linked to another mac and ran diskwarrior, defragged the harddrive which was 33% out of order. thought that would take care of everything but no. since then have had a sporratic computer, works for a 20 minutes then gets bogged down and i have to do the disk utility hard drive error correction again, cycle repeats itself over and over. finally had it, and tried to reinstall tiger again after a hard drive disk repair. that went smooth but didn't change anything, the system is still ungodly slow, i mean so slow it takes 10 minutes to boot up and 5 to start any program.

my gut says i have a failing hard drive but how do i know its not the RAM or the processor or something else.

please tell me this is fixable as i continue to need access to this computer and as of now i have none.

please remember i am very remote right now, no stores near by for hundreds of miles.

cheers,

jacob

ishan - Jul 27, 2006 - 4:45 pm

I would back up your absolutely essential files (clone your drive to an external drive if you can) then using Disk Utility, completely erase your drive writing multiple zeros to it. This should map out any bad blocks on your drive. Then reinstall Tiger (clean install). Then, assuming you cloned the drive, you can use the Migration Assistant app to migrate over apps and files from your backup.

If you have a bad hard drive, ultimately it will completely fail. If that happens, if you have a cloned copy, at least you have your apps and files. If it's bad RAM, once again, you'll have a nonfunctional computer which, for now you can't fix.

I'm sorry I can't be more positive. Perhaps you can borrow someone's Windows machine?

jakob77 - Jul 29, 2006 - 8:06 am

Thanks for the reply.

After I emailed, I found some info on your site which led me to repair disk permissions but this time from my own disk utility not on the tiger dvd.

It seemed to work really well, computer was operating really fast and normal. I left it on over night and it operated then even faster the next morning! Today however, it was slow when multiple programs were running, so i did a repair disk permissions off of disk utility, and nothing really changed. i put the disk in again to check the hard drive, and did a repair but it said it was fine, then i did a repair permission s off the internal disk utility again just to be sure. after all this the computer seemed really warm/hot. i am wondering if the fan is kicked. any way to check?

i use the monitor on the powerbook to check cpu usage and memory usage, both seem ok, i even cleared up some idle programs, like widgets to free up more RAM.

maybe it is the drive, in which case i wish i could back it all up, but no chance from here in Tanzania.

if its the RAM, which I hope at this point, it'll just have to wait until i get home. same with the fan, that is assuming that could slow the computer down if it got too hot.

i'm at a loss at this point, i just keep trying the same old tricks to keep it going.

i'll try to use it as little as possible to avoid that big crash you are talking about, just in case. and i'll burn as many dvds as i can to keep what i can backed up.

thanks again for your help.

cheers,

jacob