try reinstall panther to erase and reinstall , just see blue screen

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I have a neighbor with an old mac , 450 mgz, 198 memory and 20 gb with 8 gb free with panther. He has had many problems and I recommended to just reformat the drive, erase and start fresh with a clean install.

However, last night we put the cd in the cdrom and click, erase and install and for an hour, we just saw a blue screen. I tried to force quit and even turn it off, and nothing worked.

My neighbor is a senior citizen w/o any money so Im trying to help him.

What did I do wrong? Im new to Macs.

How can I try again, but I cant get rid off the blue screen.

I was going to try command line, fsck and now , I wish I would have taken that route.

Please Im desperate. If you can break it down for me in dummies term, I would really appreciated.

TIA
 
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What sort of problems was he having?
A complete erase and reinstall is the absolute LAST thing you should try. That slash and burn route is more of a Windows type repair, hehe :).

Does it boot up now, or have you already erased the drive?
If it boots up normally right now, the first thing you might try is a permissions repair.
Go to Applications>Utillities>Disk Utility.
Choose the HD from the left hand column and choose "Repair Permissions"

You can also boot from the OS CD.
Restart the Mac with the CD in the drive, and hold down the "C" key until the machine boots.
Then you can access Disk Utility and run a Disk Repair.


If you have already erased the drive, then boot from the CD and try reinstalling it again, but see if you can do the Archive and Install option.

Without more details on what was wrong, it is really hard to offer any other options, but if you can list some of the things that were/are happening we can probably help a lot more.

:black:
 
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spoke to my neighbor and it did ask him for the second disc and now it has his original default setting as when he bought it. He's happy and Im happy.

Thanks for your advice. You right, complete erase was probalby not the way to go. But I think it worked this time.
 

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