gray screen wont start up

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I reset the PRAM and NVRAM and still didnt work, only thing that changed was that the dim gray screen became full on white on startups thereafter and the famous macbook startup sound plays, but nothing shows on the screen. WHen I try to boot from Snow leopard DVD (currently im on leopard but lost the dvd) it ejects it after a minute and then the folder with question mark icon flashes. This occured after my computer was seriously lagging (never happened before) and I shut it off with the power button, I couldnt log on ever since. PLease someone help! do I need a new HDD?
 

chscag

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
What kind of Snow Leopard DVD are you trying to boot with? Is it a retail copy or is it from another machine? It is possible that your hard drive might be defective but without being able to boot from your install DVD you have no way of testing it.

Regards.
 
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I bought it for 30 bucks online. I believe it is a retail copy. The macbook originally came with tiger osx, and I am in the process of finding those cd's.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
1.8 GHz i7 MBA 11" OSX 10.8.2
I had a similar problem with a mac mini running tiger. The only way I was able to get it to boot was to hook a second Mac up to it with firewire - then boot in target mode - hold cmd-t when booting. I was then able to mount the disk and run disk utility off the second Mac. After running first aid it booted again. I was never able to get the tiger disks or leopard disk to boot when trying to fix it.
 
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More problems!

I replaced my HDD today with a western digital SATA drive and then when I booted off my Tiger disc to install tiger it didn't find a volume to install to. It asked where I would like to install Tiger and it gave me no options (usually I would click on the HDD). Can anyone help me? I was able to boot disk utility off the installation and it did detect the HDD with 239.x gb remaining (its supposed to be a 250Gb but I know WD messes around)

Any help would be appreciated
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Back to my old 2.2GHz C2D MB after selling my MBP and wondering what my next Mac will be :)
When you boot of your install disc, go to utilities, disk utility in the menu bar.
Select the HD at the top of the list on the left.
Select erase tab.
Format Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Name Macintosh HD.
Click erase.

Once done, quit disk utility and continue with installation.
 

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