Macbook Pro not booting up properly

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Please help!

My macbook pro will not boot up. I am running OSX Leopard 10.5.

I turn on machine and it shows spinning wheel, then shows a variety of blue and grey screen colors and will not ever kick into my desktop.

I repaired permissions, repaired disk, said system is OK. I did not have my info backed up so I ran target mode on my wife's mac to save crucial info to an external drive.

Is there a way that I can reinstall the OS without losing info & settings??

Beyond what I described above (which took me a good deal of time to figure out) I have no idea what the next best step is to take. Any suggestions or instructions?

Thank you so much for your time
 

cwa107


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14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD
Boot from the 10.5 CD and run through the install. All of your data, docs and settings will be retained. The only time you have to be concerned about losing your data is if you format your hard disk first (this is known as doing a "clean" install).
 
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Thank you cwa107...

But I have an issue in doing this (it seems). When I boot from my 10.5 disk and choose the Mac HD to install on, there is a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in it. "You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume without changing your installation settings. Click Options to change settings. You cannot upgrade this version of Mac OS X because a newer version is installed."

When I click on Options, the window that pops up says "The destination disk must be erased for installation. The destination volume will be completely erased and a new copy of Mac OS X will be installed on the volume. All your data will be lost." Then I have a drop down menu labeled "Format as: either Mac OS Extended (journaled) or Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)"

Help?
 
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Also, I just noticed that I only have 323mb available on my HD. That is likely part of the problem?? Am I able to open the HD in target disk mode on my other mac and delete some files to provide more space...would that help?
 

cwa107


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Also, I just noticed that I only have 323mb available on my HD. That is likely part of the problem?? Am I able to open the HD in target disk mode on my other mac and delete some files to provide more space...would that help?

Yes. And while you're in there, use a program like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to do a full backup of the drive, just in case you need to do a clean install.
 

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