09-07-2010, 06:48 PM

Hello.

I bought an older iMac (2006 17", not sure exactly what date this was released) on ebay. It's the second iMac I've owned (previous was PowerPC, and I no longer have it). I got the new iMac primarily because of its Intel dual-core processor.

I decided to install Windows XP to the drive, but accidentally deleted the bootcamp partition instead of reformatting. I proceeded to make several more mistakes (it was quite late and I was very distracted, the mistakes became quite obvious to me the next day). So, since I was unable to get my Mac OS X partition to boot, I installed Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit) and asked the seller I bought the iMac from for the backup disc (he said it would come with it, but I never got it).

I got the disc and verified that it is working, but the iMac fails to boot from the disc. I tried holding down 'c' to boot the disc, but that failed. The Ubuntu disc still boots. So does the Windows disc. I even tried a hackintosh disc too, and that worked (though it didn't have sufficient driver support, which I found to be odd). I'm not sure why the official retail disc would not boot. The drive is working, all the hardware appears to be working fine, nothing seems to be bad.

I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas as to what the issue could be, and more so how to fix it.

Cheers,
-Aaron

09-07-2010, 08:32 PM

I assume you would like to reinstall OS X? If you have the original install media, you can try this first: Reset the PRAM/NVRAM and then use the OS X DVD to boot the machine. Let us know if that works and we can go from there to remove Ubuntu and get OS X back working again.

09-08-2010, 09:27 PM

Thanks, that worked.

I had already attempted that before actually, but I was holding it down directly after pressing the power button before the grey screen even popped up, and holding it throughout then. Turns out I had to hold it right after the grey screen popped up.

Again, thank you.