12-01-2010, 08:44 PM

Preface: This is my first Macbook. Its probably about 4 years old and Applecare has expired. It is running 10.4.6...or was until its connectivity problems seemed so annoying and memory so low that I thought trying a complete erase and restore would be the best route to take to fix it. That alone may tell you that my experience in troubleshooting is limited. I had exhausted all the disk utility stuff I knew how to do.

I did something bold (and perhaps stupid) and ran the "erase and restore" through the disks that originally came with the macbook and it seemed to erase just fine but stalls out during the reinstall, stating that an error prevented a successful reinstallation. Try as I might I cannot get it to do a thing.

Should I purchase new OS software to install (along with more memory since I still have space left)? Will this solve it? Or is it time to bring in a professional? Or is it time to go shopping for a whole new unit? Any help you can offer will be appreciated. I am way out of my comfort zone with all this. Thank you!

12-01-2010, 09:26 PM

Memory so low? Do you mean hard drive free space as memory does not change? Boot from your install disk and go into Utilities > Disk Utility and run Repair Disk from there and see what is reported.

It always helps if you provide details on hard drive and space left, as a drive requires 15-20% free space to work anywhere near effectively. Check if there is any OS on the MB and be prepared to do a format of the drive if it is okay, Mac OS Extended, and a clean install. This explains the process, response three:-

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...2165403AAdObFD

And you should be running OS X.4.11 as there may have been a vital update following your original install of Tiger.

And suggest rather than re-installing Tiger, purchase Snow Leopard. It is much faster and leaner than Tiger.

12-02-2010, 12:34 AM

Snow Leopard is not "faster and leaner" than Tiger. It's leaner than Leopard, and brings many performance improvements, but you must remember, Tiger came out in 2004 and only requires a minimum of like 256MB of RAM to run and 3 gigs of disk space. Snow Leopard requires a minimum of 7 some odd gigs of disk space (wouldn't fit on a formatted 8 gig flash drive ). Either way, I'd still recommend the jump to snow leopard.