Seriously weird problems that I am now totally desperate about...

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Hi. I just joined the forums in response to my total desperation about my mac.

It is an OS X 10.4.5 - a mini - and I have had it since 2006. It rarely gave me problems; however, this August everything kind of collapsed at once.

Here's what happened: I was using it in the morning. I left for half the afternoon to go see a movie. There was a thunder/lightning storm going on. When I came back, I tried to open my Sims 2 game, and it quit, giving me an error message about having a graphics card incompatible with Direct X 9.0 or something. It had worked fine that morning. After scouting around about the problem, I realized that the error message was completely irrational - the Direct X thing is only for the Windows version of the game, so a Mac should never even get that error message.

Slowly, other applications began to break down as well. My iMovie HD opened, but my options were severely limited because if I clicked anything in the iMovie window, nothing would happen (I had to use keystrokes to work with it at all). My iPhoto slideshow option wouldn't work, search wouldn't work, and Microsoft Office stopped working. Finally, we got a virus scan - but nothing. Apparently it's clean.

The next problem came. I would turn on the mini and the load bar would fill up ... but then nothing would happen. The computer wouldn't boot. Finally, we just decided to reinstall the whole thing. The entire first disk reinstalled. But then we put in the second disk and encountered the latest problem. It starts installing, but after a few seconds it quits, gives us a message saying that Installer quit unexpectedly, automatically restarts Installer, and redoes the whole cycle again. I honestly now have no idea what to do, nor what the problem is.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
G'day and welcome to the forums.

Something has become corrupted. Boot from your install disc and run Repair Disc from there. If the drive reports all is well, try erasing formatting Mac OS Extended (Journalled) and another clean install.
 
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Thanks for the quick reply. How do I reboot from the install disk, and which install disc do I reboot from? (1 or 2)
 

dtravis7


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MacMini M-1 MacOS Monterey, iMac 2010 27"Quad I7 , MBPLate2011, iPad Pro10.5", iPhoneSE
#1. With the #1 DVD in the drive, restart and hold down the C key after the startup sound and keep it down till it starts to boot from the DVD.
 

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