07-23-2011, 11:20 AM
Snow Leopard has the ability to continue an aborted install in case of a power outage or other interruption. Lion has a similar feature, except that instead of being helpful, it's FUBAR.
Symptom:
After an aborted install, every time that I tried to boot from an install disk (either flash or DVD) to re-run the installer, it popped up an installation progress window, then either stalled at that screen or threw up an error, "There was a problem installing Mac OS X" and then the installer would quit. The installer recognized that I had started to install Lion once before and it was trying to finish the installation, but I needed to perform a clean install and there was nothing that I could do to get it to install from scratch.
I tried erasing and repartitioning the target drive and still the installer kept trying to resume the installation and crashing or stalling. The issue was reproducible with or without the original target drive powered on. Zapping PRAM didn't help. Somehow, the state of the original installation-attempt had been saved (to EFI?) and there didn't seem to be any way to get around it to install the OS.
The fix (after a bit of Googling and a very long night): Run the Lion installer while booted from 10.6 and then complete the installation and setup when it reboots. Thereafter, the installer will no longer cr@p out when run from Lion boot disks.
...
The fix sucks. If anyone has a better way to get around this problem, please post it.
What happens if a clean install of Lion is aborted due to a power-outage or drive problem and you need to erase the target drive or install onto a different drive?
If something like that happened with Snow Leopard, the installer might throw an error when it attempted to resume the install, but then you could erase the target drive and start again.
With Lion, you're faced with an installer that cr@ps out every time unless you first boot from Snow Leopard (which may involve installing and updating Snow Leopard) and then run the Lion installer from Snow Leopard? How is that supposed to work when the new Macs won't boot from Snow Leopard and the Rescue options all run the same flawed installer?
Symptom:
After an aborted install, every time that I tried to boot from an install disk (either flash or DVD) to re-run the installer, it popped up an installation progress window, then either stalled at that screen or threw up an error, "There was a problem installing Mac OS X" and then the installer would quit. The installer recognized that I had started to install Lion once before and it was trying to finish the installation, but I needed to perform a clean install and there was nothing that I could do to get it to install from scratch.
I tried erasing and repartitioning the target drive and still the installer kept trying to resume the installation and crashing or stalling. The issue was reproducible with or without the original target drive powered on. Zapping PRAM didn't help. Somehow, the state of the original installation-attempt had been saved (to EFI?) and there didn't seem to be any way to get around it to install the OS.
The fix (after a bit of Googling and a very long night): Run the Lion installer while booted from 10.6 and then complete the installation and setup when it reboots. Thereafter, the installer will no longer cr@p out when run from Lion boot disks.
...
The fix sucks. If anyone has a better way to get around this problem, please post it.
What happens if a clean install of Lion is aborted due to a power-outage or drive problem and you need to erase the target drive or install onto a different drive?
If something like that happened with Snow Leopard, the installer might throw an error when it attempted to resume the install, but then you could erase the target drive and start again.
With Lion, you're faced with an installer that cr@ps out every time unless you first boot from Snow Leopard (which may involve installing and updating Snow Leopard) and then run the Lion installer from Snow Leopard? How is that supposed to work when the new Macs won't boot from Snow Leopard and the Rescue options all run the same flawed installer?
