[muglo] Re: Lion taming - Hoping a picture is still worth a thousand words.

  • From: Dave Knight <dave@xxxxxxx>
  • To: muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:57:59 -0400

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

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