I don't know what to do...

Ok so a buddy of mine has an iMac G3 Snow edition which has been running OS X 10.4. It has worked fine since he got it. But he upgraded and passed it to his daughter, and she did something which messed all kinds of things up. So he wanted to re-install OS X with the DVD's he has for it. The problem is, when she dragged the stuff she wanted to keep on to my external HDD she also dragged the Application folder. I told her she didn't need it, so she trashed it. Now there are no apps on the computer at all. Nothing will work. He can't re-install OS X because it's saying he doesn't have the right permissions. So he wants to just wipe the drive and see if that works. We can't figure out how to wipe the drive since Disk Utility is gone. I have OS X installed on a partition on my external HDD, but I can't go to startup disk in system prefs because it's gone. And when I restart holding C, or opt cmd shift delete to force it to boot into it, it won't work either. So does anyone have any suggestions, or know what we should do to get OS X back on it, or even OS 9 then upgrade? Any help is greatly appreciated.

And I am really sorry if this is the wrong forum, I couldn't decide if it should go into Desktops or OS X.

Thank you,
Jake

Hey

I guess try to put Tiger's installation CD into the drive and restart so it will boot up and use the disk utility of the installation itself.
Correct me if i'm wrong but I would try that.

Good Luck =]

Welcome to Mac-Forums, Hardy.

You can use Disk Utility on the Tiger install CD to repair disk permissions but at this point if you simply want to reinstall the OS, repairing disk permissions serves no purpose.

Insert the Tiger install CD in the optical drive. Then restart the iMac and hold down Option key. This will force the Mac to look everywhere for its system, including the optical drive.

If that doesn't work, if you can find another Mac somewhere and get a FireWire cable, you can use the other Mac to install Tiger on the messed up iMac. Here's how to do it: How to use FireWire target disk mode. The idea is that the messed up iMac is the target (or slave) and the Mac that you will use to install Tiger is the host (or master).

When it is time to reinstall Tiger on the ailing iMac, use the Erase and Install method: you really don't want to carry over anything from the previous install.


Good luck! Let us know ** it goes.