I tried to upgrade my Leopard installation on my Inspiron 530s using the OSInstall.mpkg method.

It froze up OS X completely and I had to shut down.

I now can't boot from anything (Hard drive, OSX Install DVD [iPC and SnowOSX])

However, I can boot into Ubuntu and mount the partition as rw, therefore I can save myself. GParted can't resize the partition though.

Any suggestions?

Right now I have an Intel 82001I motherboard and a G33 chipset.
3GB RAM, 2.67GHz Core 2 Duo processor
320GB SATA HDD
Onboard LAN and Belkin F5D8051 N1 Wireless Card
MSI GeForce 9500GT 512MB PCIe graphics.

I was considering making a new partition and copying my /Users folder there, deleting my Leopard partition, recopying my Users folder and then going from there (Kexts, Applications etc)

What do you guys think?
Is this too big of an endeavor or is there something extremely simple that I overlooked?

Okay, I've come up with a solution we can all live with.

Made a new partition with symlinks to Applications and Users.

Installed Leopard, going to upgrade IT to Snow Leopard.

I can still use the other one for main storage, and I won't have to worry about losing files!

Perfect!

Hi man!

Just stumbled upon your post. Same thing happened to me, just on a MBP 17".
Solution was way simpler, though:

1. Boot into installer (from CD or premade OS X Install, type does not matter)
2. Go past Language chooser
3. In apple menu, choose Utilities
4. Choose Disk Utility
5. Select harddisk that OS X is on.
6. Click "Partition"
7. Resize partition with OS X on it, then resize back to original size (thus, no changes are made to the partition (This forces a write of the boot sector))
8. Click Apply
9. Close the Disk Utility (Cmd+Q)
10. Under "Utilities" choose "Startup Disk"
11. Choose disk with OS X on it.
12. Restart.

Tadaa =) Worked like a charm on my MBP!
Relieved sigh

Cheers,
- Dee