OS X Lion made my mac useless. (Trapped in the Installer)

Joined
Jul 22, 2011
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Points
1
I'm no mac novice but I don't know where else to turn. I installed Lion from the App store early this morning and everything was fine up until it rebooted into the mounted OS X installer.
After agreeing to the terms of service, I selected my internal hard drive(which is brand new, maybe 2 weeks old) to install osx on to and after a bit it tells me I can't install on this disk(brand new mind you, never a single problem while using Snow Leopard) because:

"The disk is damaged and can't be repaired"

So I reboot and go into the disk utility, because I like to humor myself. I select the hard drive itself, the 500.11GBST9500420..... and select verify disk, then repair disk, and it comes up with no errors. So I select my only partition, named "Untitled", and proceed to do the same thing, except this time it gives me an error, an "incorrect number of thread records", and says:

"Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk."

So I try to click repair disk, but it doesn't give me that option, the "Repair Disk" button is greyed out and can't be clicked. When I go back into the installer, the disk drive isn't even selectable anymore, saying

"This disk is locked."

From here I decided to just go with any other option, I tried erasing the hard drive, but it told me I couldn't because the installer was mounted, so I try unmounting the installer, and it says I can't do that, ejecting doesn't work either.
At this point I'm just tired of trying to get it to work so I give up and reboot, pressing the option key to just boot back into Snow Leopard, but of course, as is my luck, it doesn't show up. my only bootable option is the OS X Installer, and I'm officially out of ideas.
If anyone has any other option I would love to hear it. I'm working off of a 3 year old emachine and wouldn't mind getting my mac working again. I removed the hard drive and checked it out and it loads fine in my old G4, and its brand new, so I don't know why Lion won't load it. any ideas are welcome.
 
Joined
Sep 19, 2006
Messages
44
Reaction score
3
Points
8
Location
Pleasanton! CA
Your Mac's Specs
iMac Core 2 Duo, 2.33 GHz, 24", 64G 3G iPad
The only thing I can offer is that I saw a post on another forum where a user had to repair his disk after the install... But no details, sorry.
 
Joined
Jul 22, 2011
Messages
18
Reaction score
0
Points
1
Location
Sydney, Australia
I'm no mac novice but I don't know where else to turn. I installed Lion from the App store early this morning and everything was fine up until it rebooted into the mounted OS X installer.
After agreeing to the terms of service, I selected my internal hard drive(which is brand new, maybe 2 weeks old) to install osx on to and after a bit it tells me I can't install on this disk(brand new mind you, never a single problem while using Snow Leopard) because:

"The disk is damaged and can't be repaired"

So I reboot and go into the disk utility, because I like to humor myself. I select the hard drive itself, the 500.11GBST9500420..... and select verify disk, then repair disk, and it comes up with no errors. So I select my only partition, named "Untitled", and proceed to do the same thing, except this time it gives me an error, an "incorrect number of thread records", and says:

"Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk."

So I try to click repair disk, but it doesn't give me that option, the "Repair Disk" button is greyed out and can't be clicked. When I go back into the installer, the disk drive isn't even selectable anymore, saying

"This disk is locked."

From here I decided to just go with any other option, I tried erasing the hard drive, but it told me I couldn't because the installer was mounted, so I try unmounting the installer, and it says I can't do that, ejecting doesn't work either.
At this point I'm just tired of trying to get it to work so I give up and reboot, pressing the option key to just boot back into Snow Leopard, but of course, as is my luck, it doesn't show up. my only bootable option is the OS X Installer, and I'm officially out of ideas.
If anyone has any other option I would love to hear it. I'm working off of a 3 year old emachine and wouldn't mind getting my mac working again. I removed the hard drive and checked it out and it loads fine in my old G4, and its brand new, so I don't know why Lion won't load it. any ideas are welcome.

----

Hi!

Ran into this same problem when I was trying to do a clean install of Mac OSX Lion. I'll answer as much as I can of your "disc is locked" problem since you seemed to have solved the other ones.

Provided you haven't actually erased any of your original MACHD - the one with your Snow Leopard booted onto it - hop back into the installer boot (the one that Lion booted up with your mac) and instead of choosing any of the options go to the top right and click the apple logo and select start-up disk.
Now like I said, provided you haven't erased Snow Leopard off it you should be able to just go ahead and select your MACHD (or whatever you call your main Hard Drive) and boot into Snow Leopard.

-> The reason why your disc is locked is not because there's something wrong with it. The best possible and most logical explanation is that you've launched the Lion installer while you were still booted into Snow Leopard so thus the installer was placed over your main hard drive and thus you couldn't actually do anything to it otherwise you would've rid yourself of the Lion boot and screwed yourself over entirely. So that's why to do a clean install it would've had to been on a clean hard drive - one that doesn't also act as your boot drive at the same time.

So from that, if you can't figure out what to do already then here's the steps.

1) In Snow Leopard you'll have to create a separate boot disc/drive for the Lion, one that you can use separate from your hard drive - something like a flash drive or a DVD (flash drives are faster).
Note: Chances are that if you downloaded Lion off the app store, you'll have to right click on the "Lion" installer icon -> Show Package Contents -> SharedSupport -> copy the "InstallESD.dmg" file onto your desktop.
Chances are that if you downloaded it third party and it's not a rip right off the app store then it'll already be renamed.

2) For a DVD: if you go into Disc Utility in Apple and load the "InstallESD.dmg" you can burn it straight to a disc

3) For a USB flash drive - make sure you have something that is greater than 4gb, and not 4gb exactly because we all know that 4gb flash drives aren't really 4gb lol.
Go into the Disc Utility app and load the "InstallESD.dmg" and plug in your USB.
Click on "InstallESD.dmg" (which should be right at the very bottom on the left hand side of all your mounted discs) and go to restore.
It should read: Source: InstallESD.dmg
Destination: drag your usb mounted disc from the left hand side into the destination box and make sure erase destination is ticked.
Then click restore.
Bootable USB done.

4) Once you've created your bootable disc/USB, plug/load it in and restart and hold down the ALT key to choose drive options and choose your media and there you go - you'll be able to format & erase & install onto your main harddrive.

--

Anyway yep, hope this helps!
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top