OS X Lion Clean Install Problems

chillihound said:

Hi,
I am really hoping someone can help me out.
Following the various guides I have created a bootable version of Lion on my 8GB Thumbdrive without issue.

The problem come when trying to install lion, I boot holding the option key, select my lion usb drive, then os x starts to load and i'm met with an error diaglog stating the following:

There was a problem installing "Mac OS X"

Try reinstalling.

I have recreated the bootable usb several times but nothing seems to work.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

2011 Quad Core i7 Macbook Pro, 4gb Ram

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Was trying to do this same thing and was dealing with the same exact issue. I have the mid-2010 MacBook Pro.

Ultimately it was resetting the PRAM which allowed me to complete the install.

chillihound said:

baggss said:

Sounds to me like it's an issue with the Thumb Drive. Why do you need a "clean Instal" anyways?

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Possibly a problem with thumb drive however there are 2 things worth noting:

1st the DVD fails in the exact same way.

2nd the DVD works on my wifes late 2010 Macbook Pro indicating that the issue is with my 2011 Macbook Pro.

As for why, just want to know that if ever required I can reinstall my system without having to instsll snow leopard, update snow leopard, download Lion, install Lion.

Not saying it's necessary but i'd like it to work.

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I was worried that the thumb drive had gone bad and like in the OP's response, I didn't want to go the recovery DVD route because that's snow leopard.

As for why the clean install was needed, in my case I had replaced the hard drive and was having issues. I had brought over my previous hard drive contents via carbon copy cloned. I also had another partition with a barebones non-filevault install Mac OS X Lion. What was happening was that often the start up, main partition wouldn't work and I would get thrown into my secondary partition. I could still view the contents of the primary partition though (after I put in the filevault password for the disk). I tried repairing the disk and permissions and then the main disk would work. But thisnkept happening so I decided to just grab the contents and do a clean install.

(this part is a little more detail but I endednup having to just delete the whole disk/both partitions because when I deleted the primary partition just to install ghat disk again, it left a weird empty encrypted partitioned state. And I would get the OP's error so I though the problem was is encrypted area.

However, I think now I didn't have to delete my 2nd partition since the PRAM did it.

officialcoopy said:

got it to work. I ended up doing a recover (command + r) and installing directly from the App Store. Took a bit of time, but worked great.

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And I think I lost my ability to do this when I deleted the contents of the drive.