New user --> accident

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mitch381

Guest
New user (never going back!) Just got a used Beige G3 333Mhz and loaded up OSX.1.5 .... I held down ths c to boot from my OSX.1 disk then exited (never going past the boot screen on the cd). Now the computer only will boot to the cd and I get a '? floppy' when booting without the CD in the drive… I zapped the pram (per forum advice) and still get the '? floppy' on boot and the computer will still only boot from the cd. My wife is ready to kill me cause I didnt backup our data… I went into the disk tools on the OSX.1 cd and the hard drive is there but not mounted. The “mount drive” option is greyed out in the menu. The disk utility says no problems on the HD…. Canya help?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
20" iMac C2D 2.16ghz, 13" MacBook 2.0ghz, 60gb iPod vid, 1gb nano
Try holding down X when you boot up the computer to see if you can select the OS to boot from
 
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mitch381

Guest
trpnmonkey41 said:
Try holding down X when you boot up the computer to see if you can select the OS to boot from

Still just get the "?floppy" in the center of the screen....
 
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XLWH

Guest
Hi Mitch.


Unfortunately you only have OS X 1.5 so I don't think you have the following options in your install menu on the OS X cd. The last link below may be your best bet.


If you had OS X 10.2.2 or above you could reinstall the OS over itself while leaving the data intact.


I had that happen at work and the computer guy talked me through it on the phone. The work computer has OS X 10.2.8 (updated).


I had to choose the Options menu in the install window and choose - Archive and Install and Preserve Users and Network Settings ( Do not choose Erase and Install ).


This replaced the OS but saved my data.


I then had to download and reinstall each OS X update from 10.2.3 to 10.2.8 individually. ( The combo versions which combines multiple updates failed to install. )


Here are instructions if your OS were OS X 10.2 or higher -


http://kb.indiana.edu/data/akav.html


Here are the individual updates -


http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/macosxupdates.html


Here is more info on the flashing folder question mark -


http://8help.osu.edu/1244.html


http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58042


And here's a suggestion that might work -


http://www.macosx.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-39078.html


Take care,

XLWH
 
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did you hold down the x the whole time? also, try starting up while holding the option key down, a dialog should come up and let you choose which disk youd like to start up from, choose your osx installation. also, did you eject the cd already?
 

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