[mkral]

Apologies if this has already been covered. I've done a search but didn't find anything applicable to my situation. My wife uses my old Pismo. It's been running a bit slow lately, but no problems. It's running 10.4.5. Today, I updated it to 10.4.6 & when the install was almost complete, I got some kind of an error message about the upgrade not being able to install. I then restarted the machine & it won't boot up. The very first time I started it up, it got to the desktop picture, but no icons, menu bar, etc. Every time after that, it's only gotten to the grey screen with the apple & the continuously spinning grey circle.

I've pulled out the extra ram stick, so it only has the stock ram, but that didn't seem to help. I can boot it in Target disk Mode & I was able to pull off all her important data, but I can't figure out how to get it to boot back up. I think the DVD drive is hosed, as it won't normally accept a DVD (sometimes it will, but never reliably-I just tried & that won't work)

Is there anything else I can try, or should I just give up on this machine. I have an old 12" ibook, but my wife likes the screen size of the pismo.

Any ideas/suggestions/ links appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[icruise]

Assuming you can't reinstall from the DVD drive (which is what you seem to be saying) you can try putting it into target disk mode and use another machine to install OS X onto the Pismo's hard drive. Or you can put it into target disk mode, format the disk (assuming you've gotten everything you want off of it!) and then using Carbon Copy Cloner to clone a working installation of OS X (from the iBook, perhaps) onto the Pismo's hard drive. Finally, another possibility is to take out the hard disk (not that hard) and put it in an external firewire enclosure, connect it to another machine and install Tiger from the DVD that way. Don't give up on the machine. I think it's just a hosed OS install and not a hardware problem.

[mkral]

Thanks man. I'll give it a try.