I've been having all kinds of trouble with a white plastic Intel-based 17" iMac 2.0 with a 160G HD and I would like to force a low level complete format of the drive, but I don't to do that. I have the orig disks, plus I have a family pack disk of Leopard and of Snow Leopard. But that's all the tools I have to work with.
Can somebody give me a clue here? Is it possible to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch?
Many thanks.
iMac 24" White 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 3G RAM, 500G,
Mac OS X (10.5.5),
Fusion, Win XP, Parallels
I'd be happy to reformat if I could. I can get it to boot using the original disk, but when I go to Disk Utilities, the left panel where the drives are shows me my 5.3 GB Pioneer DVD drive, and a drive called "Media" which, on the erase tab, shows a "Total Capacity" of 0 bytes. Partition scheme is: Unformatted. Listed as Serial ATA 2 with Write Status: Read/Write.
If I try to erase with Volume format Mac OS Standard, I get a message: Disk Erase Failed: The chosen size is not valid for the chosen file system."
So then I go to the Partition tab and try to Partition (without setting size of Name) and I get an error message: Insufficient Privileges.
Thereafter partion opions are grayed out and I can do nothing but reboot.
If I go to the System Profiler under Installer/Utilities/, I get the profile, but when I try to look under serial-ATA I get "There was an error while scanning for Serial-ATA devices."
Oh, and one more symptom: If I leave the machine alone for a few hours, particularly but not only if I unplug it, then when I restart with the OPTION key down I can usually get at least to the icons for OSX and the Windows Bootcamp installation. Sometime I can get it to go to the actual OSX install, but from there I cannot reformat the drive, though I might be able to reinstall OSX (haven't tried).
Problem is, once I do this and get the two Icons of the Startup Manager, then on reboots following that I get only the startup chime and a gray screen--the startup manager does not work in these cases, unless I let it sit for a while (hour or so minimum).
Sounds like your Imac is having trouble seeing the HD, the drive might be failing if you boot from the original disk and cannot see it. This would be where you would have to do any formatting or partitioning as you can't do that when you have mounted the drive. If and when you get into OSx then you've mounted the drive and won't be able to do any formatting or partitioning.
Doing an archive and install will maintain your files and reload the OSx but I don't think this is your problem as sometimes the drive isn't recognized at all.
