Hi Allen, Your email is a bit impenetrable (it's late) :-) Let me know if I am getting this right... On 2011-09-15, at 10:17 PM, Allen Clark wrote: >> Sorry for this backward method - Unable to get text here after the picture >> was copied to the blank page. This comment relates only to how you sent email to the list and not your actual OS install issue. >> ( I get the same results with the USB flash drive removed.) The USB flash drive is called "InstallESD.dmg", if you physically remove it from the system you still see it as something you could boot the system from when you power on. > I am sending this from my iMac having Lion happily working for the past > couple of weeks. I saved a copy of the lion installESD.dmg to An 8gb USB via. > Disk Utility. You followed instructions like these <http://www.macworld.com/article/161069/2011/07/make_a_bootable_lion_installer.html> to make a bootable Lion install USB drive. > After first trying to do a clean install using this (bootable Lion-install > drive) I ordered another Snow Leopard disk to do it the easy way. I assume that your try to install Lion failed. How did it fail? I assume that when you say you ordered 'another' Snow Leopard disk you don't really mean you had a Snow Leopard disk laying around, but decided to buy another one anyway :) > Now I can boot up with this new disk but having erased the HD I can only copy > the disk to the HD - not able to install it. Help Please! I assume that when you say 'new disk' you mean this Snow Leopard disk. I am not at all sure what you mean by 'I can only copy the disk to the HD'. I can't imagine why you can't use a shiny new Snow Leopard install DVD to install Snow Leopard onto a machine which I presume was happily running Snow Leopard before you got it into this pickle. As you haven't said how either the Lion, or Snow Leopard install attempts actually fail it's nigh on impossible to advise you. That said, assuming that everything is actually working hardware-wise, if I were you I would: Boot the MacBook with the Snow Leopard DVD Before the Installer proper starts choose "Disk Utility" from the Utilities menu Select the Hard Drive Go into the Partitions tab and set... Partition Layout: 1 partition Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Options GUID Partition Table Hit Apply! When that's done exit Disk Utility and start the Snow Leopard installer and do a by-the-defaults install This method definitively blows away any nonsense on the hard drive so you can do a truly fresh install, if it doesn't work it would suggest to me that your Mac is sick in a way that no amount of different install approaches will fix. dave--- Manage your account options at //www.freelists.org/list/muglo