V-Flyer

Hi,

I have to start by saying that "I know NOTHING about mac's"...

My mate has just purchased a 2nd hand Intel MacBook Pro from ebay. The mac arrived, but did not come with any cd/dvd's for OS X or applications.
The mac had loads of junk on it, so he wanted to purchase OS X and start afresh.

His good lady is a CSS for Virgin, and she picked up a copy of OS X 10.4 from the states the other day. We put the DVD in the drive, and rebooted... Nothing. After a few mins of google, I found out that you should hold down the C key while its rebooting... but still nothing!!!

You can open the DVD when the mac is running, and browse it...

After a little more google time, it would apear that the DVD we had was for a PowerPC chip, and not an intel chip. Is there a different version of OS X for the intel mac? or should the powerpc version work??? or, am I just doing something wrong... Is there a special way to get it to recover from the DVD's???

Any help or advice would be great... Like I said, I dont know anything about macs, so any help is more that I know!!!

Thanks in advance,

Danno

Google is right, you need OS X Tiger (10.4) for your Intel Mac. PowerPC is a completely different chip-set and will not work.

What is on it that you want to get rid of? Mac's come pre-loaded with Applications and the OS, it might be a whole lot easier to just remove the applications you dont want. Simply drag the application icon from the application folder into the trash canto remove them. Same with any personal data that is on there. Alternatively, create a new user account for yourself and delete the one that is on there right now - that will take a lot of rubbish with it.

Urge your friend to contact the seller and ask for the Tiger disc. It would have come with the Mac and should stay with the Mac.

Thanks,
Sarah

It wouldn't do any harm to do a software update by clicking on the Apple icon at the topleft of the screen. That will ensure you have the latest version of Tiger installed. Also do everything HighFlyer suggests, including talking to the seller. I checked the Apple website and the only version of Tiger you can buy officially is the one for Power PC chips, designed as an upgrade for people who bought older macs.

A last resort would be to check Ebay or maybe one of the Mac owners here might have a spare? I would help but my Mac is a G4 so the installation discs would be no good to you.

Paul

Thanks both for your help...

I have checked eBay and found the following... It looks like the right thing, but wondered if you could confirm it for me...

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Apple-Mac-OS-X-10 ... dZViewItem

Thanks

Danno

Looks like the right thing to me [y]

Thanks everyone!!!

Been a great help!

Danno

I have found that from experience with my mac (which is a powerpc not Intel) that if I want to boot from DVD I have to change the boot disc from System Settings. Holding down the C key has never worked for me.

Paul