I was bemused to discover that OSX could not be installed on a brand new hard disk drive I had just installed (because of a message in the installer, ‘Mac OS X cannot boot from this volume’, no matter how I specified the volume I had created with Disk Utility). I’ll spare you the suspense – the action below fixed the problem and it should work for other folk with the same problem, as long as they are prepared to use the command line.
Note that the reason for the failure to install is that the ‘Intel’ macs need to have their boot disks partitioned with a scheme known as GUID. In the version of Disk Utility that’s on my install disk, there is simply no way to specify this, because it is done using the ‘options’ sub-window accessed from the ‘options’ button on the ‘partition’ screen . That button isn’t just greyed out, it’s missing altogether when the HDD is selected in the left-hand list of disks. Which makes it rather difficult to press.
OK, so the cure:
- Verify that you really do want to start from scratch
- Boot off the install disk (you’ll be doing this already, or you are reading the wrong post)
- Choose ‘Terminal’ in the ‘Utilities’ menu
- Then read ‘Explanation and guidance’ below, and substituting the correct values for your setup, type:
diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk0 1 GPTFormat JournaledHFS+ my-hard-disk 111G
It’s all on a single line and you need to hit return at the end to make things happen.
- You should see progress information, followed by a neat table giving the new formatting that has been applied
Quit Terminal and you should now be able to proceed with the install.
Explanation and guidance
‘/dev/disk0’ is how the operating system refers to the first whole disk in the system. For a MacBook Pro without external stuff attached, this is correct for a newly-inserted replacement internal HDD.
Then, the ‘1’ here signifies that you want one volume only on the drive.
Then, replace ‘my-hard-disk’ with the volume name you want to use (this is the name of the disk as it appears in the finder – it’s in fact a volume, and you could have many more than one, but that’s beyond this post).
Finally, replace ‘111G’ with the size of the disk in gigabytes. It’s usually about the same as the disk, and as the partitioning software will stretch a single partition to fill the disk it doesn’t matter too much. 111G was the value I used for my 120GB Seagate Momentus HDD, because I already knew that it wasn’t really 120GB (again, the reason for that is beyond this post).
Good luck!
