can't reinstall os x on a g5...

macfly

please help!

yesterday i noticed that my mail ap quit unexpectedly. i am good about repairing permissions often so tried this again and nothing. whenever i tried to start mail it would just show the unexpectedly quit box and stop. trashing prefs didnt help. after awhile i decided to just wipe the drive (formatting with zeros) and reinstall. on a brand new 10.3.5 disk it would get through disc one and then during the disc 2 install it would stop saying "errors on intallation". i tried reparing the disc, doing a complete techtool deluxe surface scan which showed no problems. i would imagine this has something to do with a bad drive but am at a loss.

anyone have a clue what this could be? i really dont want to take this thing over to the apple store so i am without it for a week or so. would really appreciate any help but have a bad feeling that something hardware is toast....

karl kuehn

Did it say "error on installation disk"? If so, then it is telling you that there is a problem with your CD (or possibly the CD/DVD drive, but bet on the media first). With 10.3 (or possible 10.2) Apple put in a check on the files on the CD, to eliminate some of the calls to tech support.

costique

I've had this same problem once installing 10.3.0 on a brand-new G5. I even tried reformatting the hard disk. The culprit turned out to be a bad RAM module.