Member Avatar for petefalck

Here's the story...

My room mate decided to download an illegal torrent of osx 10.5 (my Mac was running 10.4.9 just fine) and tried to install it and got frustrated. He found a web tutorial on how to back up your drive using the Disk Utility restore feature. He "figured" that if you can copy your existing data from your HDD to another media why wouldn't "restoring" the illegal 10.5 image onto the HDD work... Well long story short, it didn't work and of course he didn't tell me what was going on until after I got back from my Thanksgiving break. The computer now fails to load OSX (Stays on the Apple screen with the rotating circle of lines forever... seriously it's been going at it for a few days.) Will not boot in Verbose or Safe Mode and the original restore/install disks are long gone. I'm not sure how to get my machine back up and running.

I do, however also have a G4 Tower running 10.3 that I had networked to the main Mac as extra storage and stuff like that. If I hook the two computers together VIA firewire and do the startup key combo to start off a target fire wire drive will that do anything?

Or do I have to buy another legal copy of OSX and install?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by joeedel89

Dani AI

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Short, practical plan before doing anything else: protect your data first, then fix the OS. pointed at cloning/restore-disc routes — those are valid endgames — but the immediate steps below reduce risk of permanent loss and clarify what you can do with the G4 you already have.

Try to salvage files via FireWire target-mount (if the Mac supports it) or by connecting the drive to another machine. If the broken Mac will present itself as a FireWire target, copy your entire Home folder to an external drive before attempting any repair or reinstall. If Finder copy fails because of permissions or metadata, run the copy as root from Terminal or use ditto to preserve Mac-specific metadata, for example:

sudo ditto /Volumes/BrokenHD/Users/yourname /Volumes/Backup/yourname

If the Mac will not enter target mode, reset PRAM (hold Command+Option+P+R at startup until the second chime) and the SMC per your model, then try again.

If you can recover data, inspect the internal disk for filesystem errors. Boot to single-user mode (Command+S) and run:

/sbin/fsck -fy

repeat it until the tool reports the volume is OK, then reboot. If you can boot from an external installer or retail DVD, run Disk Utility First Aid and check the partition map. If the disk image restore overwrote the partition map or boot blocks, a fresh partition map and reformat followed by a clean install is the safest route — but only after personal files are backed up.

A legal install medium matching your Mac’s architecture and model is required for a reliable reinstall. Model-specific restore DVDs (the ones that shipped with machines) differ from retail installers; if the original discs are lost, Apple or an authorized service can help obtain correct media. For contemporary Macs, Internet Recovery is an option, but older machines (your era) usually require physical media. If the drive shows hardware faults or these steps are unclear, consider an Apple Store or a professional data-recovery service. For official guidance, see Apple Support.

Member Avatar for joeedel89

Hello,
If both macs are power pc's you could use carbon copy cloner (google it) to clone your g4 to your broken mac via firewire just make sure to back up your things first (also via firewire). In the case that your broken mac is intel platform I would just find restore disks for the same model and use them (do an archive and install) so that you wont loose any personal info.

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