Clean install of Lion reboots and gives me Circle with Slash Through it

Hey Everyone,

I bought a brand new Macbook Pro (i5, 2.3ghz, 4gb memory) that came with Snow Leopard.

I qualified for the free update to Lion, I downloaded it through the app store and upgraded to Lion fine. I wanted to do a clean install though since I wanted to use my 500gb hdd instead of the 320gb that came with the macbook.

Following numerous tutorials on the web, I opened the package contents of the Lion Install app that was downloaded through the app store, and "burned" the installesd.dmg to my external hdd.

I erased my disk and booted from my external hard drive. I booted into the Lion Installation screen and chose to install Lion in the most simplest fashion (1 partition, all default settings.)

After it did its thing for a while, my computer rebooted and I saw this for several hours:



I have since reinstalled Snow Leopard and have searched around for why this might be happening to a brand new Macbook Pro.

I'm thinking about just installing Snow Leopard and upgraded to Lion, but will not be able to do so while this nags at me. It seems to me that others have been able to successfully clean install Lion, and I'm wondering why I cannot.

Could well be Lion requires Snow Leopard to be installed first. Have a look at this link:-


Explaining the Mac OS X Lion Clean Install

Er, that's not what the link says. It says you need Snow Leopard for App Store access to get Lion in the first place, but then you can do a clean install.

ubers0ldat, what was the format of the 500GB HDD? Any time I've bought one, it was Windows, and I had to re-format to HFS+ or whatever BEFORE doing any OS X install...

&/or: If you have no OS on your 500GB, then it can't open the .dmg.

The way I've successfully done a few clean installs is to actually physically install the new hard drive into my machine, and proceed. For Lion, I'd make a USB image...though I'm not sure my "new" machine will boot from that...I might have to burn a DVD...

I know that the Lion install will fail if the boot drive wasn't HFS+ Extended *journaled.* All bootable drives should be journaled as a matter of course.

I did indeed format the 500GB hdd as HFS+ Journalled (I think I also chose the "encrypted" option of this.)

Any other ideas?

You can't install to an encrypted disk. Release the disk, remove the encryption and install again. It should work this time. After Lion is up and running, you can encrypt the disk.

What are the specs of your Mac? I get that trying to install on my Core Duo Mini. Even though I have a C2D CPU, the Firmware shows the installer it's a Core Duo mini and gives me that NO WAY image!