clean install of mac osx?

Question

i just got an emac for a local surplus store. i want to put mac osx on it. it does not have a hard drive but i have one at my house which can be used for mac. my friend is going to let me borrow his mac osx disk that came with his ibook he just brought last week. The disk says restore. Will that still let me put mac osx on this computer. that has a new harddrive with nothing on it. please help.
-sam

Answer 1

And the correct answer is "No".

You cannot use an iBook restore CD/DVD to install on anything except that series of iBook. If you had an OS X retail CD/DVD that would work but only to install on an external Firewire drive that is formatted either "Mac OS Extended", "Mac OS Extended (journaled)" or UFS. For UFS, you would be limited as to what additional software besides OS X you can install and you would not have the option to use the Software Updates application.

There are ways to change the firmware of the eMac to allow Mac OS install on a USB drive but you are going to hate it as USB does't have wide enough bandwidth to run OS X very well. Your best bet is to buy a nice, new 100 GB or larger ATA hard drive and let an Apple service facility install it for you.

By the way, when you say "it doesn't have a hard drive", do you mean the hard drive has been pulled or it fails to mount? If the latter, you should be able to format it when you boot to the OS X install CD/DVD. It's so hard to get a hard drive out of an eMac, I find it amazing to think anyone would actually take one out and not go ahead and put a new one in while the box is all in pieces.

Answer 2

Well to begin with, are you going to put in the difficult force your self? Or, are you going to have apple do it for you? Assuming that you are going to have it established for you, you will have to be competent to put in OS X and run it simply quality.

Answer 3

yes, it should work, but you should first make sure your emac can run OS X first.