Problems installing Snow leopard on iMac from disc

Question

Problems installing Snow leopard on iMac from disc

I dual-booted my iMac with Ubuntu, and I had terrible trouble trying to get back onto my Mac OS. So someone suggested getting the discs that came with the iMac to reboot it - I did that just fine but when I get into the installation of SL it asks me to install on the HD and when i select it, it says it cannot install on the selected disc, theres over 1.2TBs free on it so I don't see why this is happeneing and it won't recognise my back-up from my external HD.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

iMac (27-inch Mid 2010), iOS 6.0.1

Posted on Oct 1, 2013 12:42 PM

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Answer 1

seventy one

Level 7

27,424 points

Oct 1, 2013 3:23 PM in response to Ailish Ní hÉigeartaigh

You are sure the Snow leopard disk is the one that came with the machine. That you haven't bought a copy elsewhere. What colour is it?

If the latter applies you may find that the disk you need is machine specific and you may have to approach Apple for that. Have your machine serial number ready.

I am a little hazy about this but you can be sure someone will stop by and clarify the matter if I am wrong.

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Answer 2

Oct 4, 2013 11:29 AM in response to seventy one

How did you install Ubuntu? "Along side" OSx, or on a different partition?

If you installed it on a different partition, you might be in luck. Ubuntu installs GRUB as its boot loader, and it seems to overwrite the OS BootX boot loader. Are you always booting into the GRUB menue or directly into Ubuntu? If yes, then you can try a PRAM reset first:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

This will reset all booting options.

But then your Ubuntu boot loader Grub will be gone.. and you wont be able to get into Ubuntu again..

You can reinstall GRUB by using the Boot Repair CD from Sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/

and make sure you install it back onto the EFI partition (usually /dev/sda1)

BE PREPARED TO LOOSE ALL DATA! Playing around with this stuff is not easy, and you will probably have to format your drive if it does not go right!

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