A friend's eMac was working fine until the name of the administrator was changed incorrectly in Systems Accounts

Question

I am trying to fix a friend’s eMac. It was working fine until the name of the administrator was changed incorrectly in Systems Accounts. Upon restart the computer failed to mount. I tried to reinstall Tiger and could not. The destination to do this install could not be found. While in Disk Utilities I tried to repair and then zero out erase the hard drive, this also could not be successfully done. The hard drive was working perfectly before the name change. I may try to load Tiger from the eMac onto an external drive and then hope to erase the eMac internal drive.
Thank you for your thoughts on this as it would be a shame to retire this trusted computer.
Nick M.

Answer 1

Hello,
Thank you very much for your attention to this. Yesterday I was able to get the eMac to install Leopard onto an external drive. I had hoped that once done I would be able to initialize or erase the content of the internal drive in Disk Utility, but was not able to do so, I only received error messages telling me my request failed. This was also true when I tried to create partitions on it. So in effect, the computer runs, but only from the external drive. I could not even find the internal drive while running from the external drive. Where is it? And the internal drive only occasionally shows up in Disk Utility.
As for holding Option and Alt, the internal drive did not show up.
And Leopard was running on the eMac when I lost contact with it. Again, all failed when a name of the administrator was changed, but was not properly done. Or something like this.
Is there anyway I can use Terminal to help reach the internal drive?
I realize I am asking a lot of questions.
And I thank you for your time,
Nick M.