We frequently get asked what to do when someone has been having difficult problems such as crashes or other systemwide bad behavior and has either voluntarily or been recommended to do an "archive and install", and has been unable to successfully complete this, so I am posting a general hint on what to do when an archive and install fails to complete:

In most cases it's a hardware problem. I would expect one of, in order of probability:
- bad restore disc
- bad memory
- bad internal hard drive
- other logic board problem
- bad optical drive

First lets just take care of the easy things. If you are getting the black box and 'you need to restart' before you get to a menu, either you have a serious logic board problem or you are trying to use restore discs that came with a different computer. If you get a message saying you cannot use this disc, you definitely are using the wrong restore discs. Find your originals, call apple and get replacements, or go buy a retail copy.

If you get up to the menus but it doesn't list your hard drive, open disk utility from the menu above and see if the hard drive shows up in disk utility. If Disk Utility hangs (does not show anything, not even the restore disc) then the hard drive may be going bad. You can sometimes hear it making a clicking or other unusual noise but it's hard to diagnose unless you know what to listen for.

If you can select your hard drive but it says it cannot install onto that disc, you may have the disc formatted wrong. Assuming there's nothing on the hard drive you need to keep, you can erase it using disc utility. Select it from the utilities menu up top. The hard drive may show up as two (or more) entries in the list on the left. Select the top occurrence, and on the right select Partition. Change from "current" to "1 partition". Rename it from Untitled to Macintosh HD if you want. You could go into Options and make sure its going to partition correctly (APS/GUID) but that should set itself automatically. APS is for powerpc macs, GUID is for all intel macs. Click partition and it will fix it. You should be able to quit disk utility now and run the installation. If your installer disk is old it may require you to reboot to show the drive as available. (this problem was fixed in 10.4 I think)

From now on I assume you were able to select your hard drive and begin the restore, but got an error before the restore finished:

First quick thing you can do is inspect the disc for pinholes of light visible through the surface when held up to a light. Just hold it up to a bright light and look for pinholes shining through the top. The "data" is actually NOT on the bottom of the disc, it's on the top, just under the grey/black label, so if that label has been damaged, and you can see through it, the data is GONE and the disc must be replaced. Scuffs on the bottom side of the disc can also prevent the disc from reading properly, but it's hard to tell if a minor scuff is going to cause a problem or not. You can also put the disc in another mac and make a DMG of it, and reburn it, and try the burned disc. If it fails to make the DMG, or if the burned disc works, the original is bad/marginal. Sometimes a scuffed disc that you can't restore from CAN be read from another computer's more tolerant optical drive, and you can use that mac to burn a copy of the disc that works in your computer. Use Disk Utility to make a DMG of the CD and then burn it. If you get an error when making the DMG, the disc is definitely bad and you will probably have to give apple a call and ask them to send you new discs. You CANNOT use discs from another mac unless it's the exact same model, so don't bother trying to use discs from say, your friend's macbook pro, on your imac. Even discs from a different model of imac won't work on YOUR imac.

Besides suspecting the restore disc, the biggest thing now is to rerun the installer, and once it gets going, go to the menus above and open the installer log. Once that's open, down below change it to Show Everything. When the installer stops, there should be useful error messages somewhere in the last page or two of the log. 95% of the time it reports either an I/O error, (bad disc) or a failure to verify a bomfile. (bad memory, or possibly other logic board problem) There will probably be quite a few lines of "noise" following the important error before the installer stops, because the error will trigger a cascade of problems before the installer halts. If you didn't skip the disc verify, and you have only one restore disc, (or if two, and the error happens before you get to disc 2) I would expect a bomfile error. Getting bomfile errors is almost always going to result in bad memory or bad logic board.

You can also run the apple hardware test on your restore disc which may identify the problem. Run the extended (long) test if available. This would be a good thing to verify what the error log above found. AHT can't find every problem though, it can only possibly confirm or narrow down a problem you have already been running into.

If you get an IO error in the log, look at the disc it lists as the error. "disk0" (usually with s## behind it, like "disk0s2") indicates the startup disc. When booted off the CD, that means the CD. "disk1" (or sometimes 2) is the internal hard drive. If the errors are on disk0 it's having problems reading the CD. If disk1, it's having problems writing to the hard drive. If disk1, then your hard drive must be replaced.

Finally, it's possible your internal optical drive is having problems. If you get disk0 errors, and have tried DMG'ing and reburning and restoring from the burn and continue to get disk0 errors, try "borrowing" an optical drive from another mac, possibly the one you used to make the copy. Insert the restore disc in the other mac, and restart it, while holding "T". A blue or grey screen will come up with a grey or orange firewire symbol floating around. Get out a firewire cable and plug it in between your mac and the other mac, and restart your mac. Hold down "option" when it chimes, and then wait for it to show the CD, in the other machine. Select the CD and continue. This lets you use the other computer's optical drive to run the restore on your computer. This is unfortunately not an option with the newest macs that lack a firewire port. In that case you may find a friend that has a usb optical drive you can plug in and try that.

please DO NOT reply to this post. If you have questions please start a new thread in one of the OS topics. (tiger or leopard)