[Wman]

I just did an archive install of OSS on my PowerBook. For some reason ithad 7 gb of space less left on the disk. I instlled adobe premium packAge and it was almost full, then I did a software update and it ran out of space then froze, so I restarted andnow the little spinny thing under the apple just goes on forever. It has been running for about three hours now. Anyone have any idea what might be wrong?

[Wman]

bumping. really need help with this one. I can't turn it on and I have no other mac at the moment to get the files off it via firewire. I don't even know if target disk would work. Really need help. Anyone?

[harryb2448]

First up try and zap the PRAM. Boot and after the chime immediately hold down Command (one with Apple logo) Option, P and R all at the same time.

Keep held down until at least the second chime after reboot. Keep us posted

7GB is not nearly enough free space. You need at least 15% free space after all installs to ensure the machine can access the drive.

[Wman]

well. When I did the archive install I had 17GB free space, then, when I was done I had 10GB, then I (stupidly) installed adobe CS4 package, which took up most of the 10gb space. Prior to the install, I had 0kb free space, but I deleted a 17gb folder in order to make room for a leopard .dmg (as the dl disk I have didn't seem to work)

So what I did is the following:
-deleted movies folder (17gb space left)
-made a 7.40gb partition of the main (80gb) drive (10gb space left)
-restored the leopard dmg (7.14gb) to the 7.40gb partition (10gb space left)
-booted off the partition (10gb space left)
-archive installed leopard (10gb space left)
-booted up and deleted 7.40gb partition (still 10gb space left) <-- should have 17gb here. where did the 7.40gb go?
-installed cs4
-can no longer boot!
hopefully that will help explain my situation.

pram zap results:
help down cmd,opt,p,r until 3rd chime, apple logo appears, spinner appears, spinner keeps going just as before.

doesn't seem to work
booked a genius appointment, but I don't wanna end up paying apple to fix this. lol I've already replaced the screen, lcd cable, many parts of the wifi system and the dvd drive myself, just cuz apple's prices are too high. I'm not going to do it simply because of a software problem. I still can't figure out what's wrong.

[Wman]

problem solved. Well not really solved. I went into single user mode, copied my important data to a usb drive and reinstalled tiger. My new problem is installing leopard. This powerbook can't boot off usb drives or read dvddl's. Normally I would've cloned a dmg from a leo disk on another machine, made a partition of the main hd in my powerbook, restored the dmg to the partition and booted off the partition to install leo, but, in tiger, you can't partition the main hd, so I don't know how I am going to install leo short of stripping the dmg down to dvd size.

[harryb2448]

Or going out and purchasing an external Firewire optical drive and trying your install from the Leopard disk?

Here is another link that may help:-

Installing Leopard without DVD Drive - The macosxhints Forums