Mac OS X error occured during installation

My wife just tried installing Snow leopard but right towards the end of installation it said an error occured and it just kept "thinking". I eventually just had to turn the power off b/c it was "thinking" for 1/2 hour. When I turned the power back on, it just gave me a ? on a folder. I then held the option button and it came up with a screen to install snow leopard again. It didn't work before, so I assume it's not going to work again. How can I make it get off this installer screen and to go back to the regular operating system that is actually installed, not snow leopard. It gives me Utility option on the top, but I don't want to lose important files that were up during the install.

Well 260 views and no one could help me. Luckily the Apple tech on the phone explained it to me and we got it to work. Apparently when installing a new OS, you have to start the install after you restart the computer (you can't just put the cd in on your home screen and click install). We restarted the computer and held "C" and it allowed us to reinstall the Snow Leopard. Her computer is really slow now, but I expected it as it's quite old >5 years and Snow leopard demands more than the previous OS.

Agnt008 said:

Well 260 views and no one could help me.

Click to expand...

Sorry...wrong conclusion. Most of those views are not from registered members.

- Nikc

Well that's reassuring. Thanks for the info, but that is quite confusing.

Not confusing at all. Every time a Google search hit on one of our forum threads scores, it's counted as a view. Which means your thread could have been viewed 280 times by non-members. Anyway, we're glad to hear you've resolved the problem.