cant see start up screen in macair

I need to reformat Mac Air and i am using an external drive in usb port
I am also using an external monitor because lcd in mac air is defective.
it all was working great util skype corrupted some files and when i run disk utility said disk needs repair. Proceeded to install from external drive with snow leopard but i cant see anything (n0 menus) only the background picture and drive spins up to a point and stops, I asume it is asking were to install but i cant see any menu.

help please

Welcome to the Mac Forums.

This is a dilemma for which there is no remedy except to replace the LCD display on your MacBook Air. Since the Air has no firewire port, you can not even use firewire target disk mode from another machine to do the installation.

If the Air is still working even with the corrupted files, you may be able to use software to take care of the disk corruption. Disk Warrior comes to mind but I'm not sure how well it would work from your external USB optical drive. If the optical drive is the one for the Air, it should be OK.

Thank you chscag for your reply

I tried to use remote disk from my other macbook but same thing happens
I cant see any menus to direct installer to target disk.
The mouse arrow seems to move way past the screen width and i think thats where the menus would be.
is there a way to shrink window screen after system starts booting up from CD so i can see the whole width?

The mouse arrow seems to move way past the screen width and i think thats where the menus would be.
is there a way to shrink window screen after system starts booting up from CD so i can see the whole width?

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, there's no way to shrink the screen without changing the resolution, and you can't do that until after the install completes.

so what are my options?
can i take HD out and install it on my macbook to format it? will the connectors be the same? Repairing the Macair screen is about $400 and frankly with its limitations on memory and no CD-DVD ,and else its not worth repairing. Thats why I was using external monitor on it
thanks any ideas or suggestion will be welcome!!!

Removing the drive from the Air is not an easy task. Go to iFixit: The free repair manual and look up the removal procedure for your model. After it's out, you can either place it in a USB carrier or use and adapter to attach it to your MacBook. Other World Computing sells a nice adapter. LINK

thanks for your answer. Will post results or if I come up with a different solution