OS X :: Unable To Install Snow Leopard / Contents Of This Disk Can't Be Changed
Aug 28, 2009
I was upgrading from Tiger to Snow Leopard (I asked a worker in the Apple store and he assured me it was okay to do so) and about 15 minutes into the installation I got a message saying "Unable to install. Please retry". Then when I retried it says "The contents of this disk can't be changed. Mac OS X couldn't be installed on this disk."
I have a black MBP and it is Intel based and I fit the system requirements
I got the error, "The contents of this disk can't be changed. Mac OS X couldn't be installed on this disk."
I restarted, to boot from the startup disk, not the CD.
And now it just goes to the grey screen and shuts off.
Pressing "C" or "Opt - Command - P - R" or holding down the Power button for a while and then restarting, or trying "Command - V"..... none of it works.
The machine just goes to the grey screen, the wheel spins, and it turns off.
I restored from backup OS X 10.5.8 Leopard using Time Machine to a brand new drive. After manually migrating some data to the newly restored boot drive I accidentally replaced the /Library/receipts folder with an out dated receipts folder. The problem is there is no way to get the proper receipts folder back so I'm stuck with a receipts folder filled with permissions that are not in sync with the list. I'm assuming this blunder is causing the error: The underlying task reported failure on exit, every time I try to repair permissions. I need this boot drive to be stable and want to avoid installing from DVD the OS from scratch. The drive checks out ok with every test accept repair permissions. The system is running VERY stable now on this brand new WD Caviar Black 1 TB drive. Do you think it's safe to clone this drive even though repair permissions won't work anymore?
I have a Snow Leopard Install Disk for the 13-inch Macbook Pro model.I also have a 21-inch iMac. I have OS X Lion installed on both. I have Snow Leopard installed as a partition on my Macbook Pro, which I installed via the install disk. I want to do the same thing for my iMac but I am unable due to (seemingly) my install disk is for a Macbook Pro and not for an iMac.
The internal hard drive on my early 2009 iMac is being replaced but I have to reinstall Snow Leopard myself.I did search in MRoogle and at Apple and cannot seem to find instructions on how to perform a clean Snow Leopard install on an iMac internal HD.
Can I do this? And if so how? Or do you think I should try and install Leopard on the existing Hd in the iMac? I still have these discs but have to get the SL applications install disc out of my drive (it's stuck and the iMac won't boot past the blue screen).
I work in an office where we've picked up a few new MBPs. These machines have Snow Leopard and I'd like to install it on my machine running Leopard. Is there any way that I can install 10.6 on my machine using the Disks that came with the new machines?
While upgrading from Tiger 10.4 to Snow Leopard 10.6 (Mac Box Set purchased from apple store) on my macbook pro the installation process froze up. Tried several times with same outcome. Even wiped the disk & reinstalled original software (tiger 10.4). No disk repairs necessary. So starting with a clean slate snow leopard still wont make it through the installation process.
My HDD died recently and I cannot get booted into OS X. It just hangs on the grey screen with the apple. I am (was) running 10.6.8
I am having a lot of trouble trying to boot from my install DVD. First of all I purchased a new HDD which came with Lion pre-installed on it. This worked fine, except when I tried to restore my latest time machine back up it used up 200GB of my disk space but nothing is restored? No doucments or music anywhere, photos, nothing. There is no change at all except half my storage has disappeared. I had posted another question on here and the reply said to use setup assistant, which I could not locate in Lion? I then tried to install Snow Leopard back over Lion but it would not let me. I tried to boot to the install disk but it just hung at the apple screen again.
I gave up and bought another brand new HDD but it won't recognise it on boot up. I just get a flashing folder with a ? in it. I tried to boot into the install DVD and again it wouldn't do it.
I then went back to my original HDD, and tried to boot to the install DVD from that (I hadn't tried this first off as my install disk was elsewhere and I purchased the Lion HDD as a stop gap measure) and it STILL wouldn't do it? This is now the original disk with the original install DVD (10.6) issued with my macbook pro when I purchased it and it will not boot to the DVD. Why why why?! It is almost enough to make me bin the lot and switch to windows.
this isn't an isolated issue - there are threads about this over at Apple and InsanelyMac: I'm unable to install Snow Leopard. When I run the installer, it'll tell me that "Mac OS X cannot be installed on "Macintosh HD", because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer" (Macintosh HD being my OS X volume, obviously). I'm seeing this issue on a relatively new 1.8ghz Macbook Air with a 128gb SSD - however, as far as I can tell from the other threads, the problem also affects iMacs and Macbooks.
Some people apparently attributed the issue to a PGP installation they had on their harddrive. Others found a file called backup.backupdb in their root - deleting it fixed the problem. However, most people don't have any of that installed on their computers and the upgrade still won't work. - if anyone has found a solution to the issue, please let me know :-( I'm stuck here. I don't have an external drive for the MBA and booting from a network drive has never worked on this particular machine - so I can't do a clean install, either.
I have a Macbook Pro with an inoperative slot-loading Superdrive. I purchased Snow Leopard today, planning to use my Mac Pro w/working Superdrive in Firewire Target Disk Mode to install the OS on my Macbook Pro. I can mount the Snow Leopard install via TDM, but the installer informs me that I cannot install Snow Leopard from "this volume" (presumably because the Target Disk Mode connection isn't recognized as an optical drive?). I've also tried to use "Remote Install OS X," but because my MBP is not an Air, it doesn't have the necessary firmware to select a network boot on startup by holding Option. Am I out of luck until I get access to a firewire external DVD drive?
I've been a long time lurker on these forums and you've helped me out numerous times when my computers decided to stop working.
I got my Snow Leopard disk in the post today but unfortunately my disk drive in my Macbook Pro seems to finally be well and truly knackered.
I should be able to borrow a usb/firewire disk drive from a friend, so would I be able to install ok from this external drive, and is there anything I would need to mess around with to make it work?
I have an early 08 MBP that shipped with Leopard. I upgraded it to Snow Leopard quite a long time ago. I feel like doing a clean reinstallation but my Leopard disk is spoilt.
Is it possible for me to do a brand new clean installation just using that Snow Leopard upgrade disk?
I am trying to upgrade from leopard to snow leopard on my MacBook Pro. However, every time I insert the install disk, the machine whirs for a moment, and then ejects the disk with no error message. I tested my drive with a different dvd and it works just fine. All of my other software is up to date.
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2009), Mac OS X (10.5.8)
Hey guys, I was just wondering if its possible for me to upgrade to snow leopard using the 10.6.7 grey install disk? A friend of mine is willing to lend me his but I'm not quite sure if it can. So my question is, can I use his grey install disk with version 10.6.7 to upgrade to snow leopard or do I need the retail snow leopard disk?
I have cracked my OS X 10.6.4 install disk, (which, it seems to mean that my iLife application disk wont work either). Is there any way to get a replacement? I don't always live near internet access, so Lion isn't really an option.
I have an old mac Book with OS X 10.5.8 running on it and I have a family DVD version of leopard that I have installed on my imac( that currently runs Lion(10.7.2) so it should install in my mac book. When I insert it into the macbook it whizzes for a bit and then spits out the dvd. I need to update this mac book so that I can run icloud etc on this machine to keep up with all my appointments etc ( I did check that it has an intel processor as required for lion)
I have replaced may Snow Leopard Family pack and have found that the replacement disk is also faulty. It stalls at around 40 minute mark and does not install. I have confirmed a general problem from two store sources. I also have similar problem with copies i bought from US. There is a noticeable defect along the outside edge of disk and swirling to a coma form of about a centimeter. Seems like a quality control issue at the disk creation instead of information burning. I have had no problems with the single versions of the OS.
My Macbook pro has just had a new 500gb hard drive in it and osx snow leopard had not been put on it because i never got a disk when i bought it. It still comes up with the grey screen with the flashing folder which i think would be normal because there is nothing on the hard drive. How do i install OSX Snow Leopard back on it the cheapest way possible?
My Macbook pro has just had a new 500gb hard drive in it and osx snow leopard had not been put on it because i never got a disk when i bought it. It still comes up with the grey screen with the flashing folder which i think would be normal because there is nothing on the hard drive. How do i install OSX Snow Leopard back on it the cheapest way possible? and easiest.
Insecure Startup Item disabled. "/Library/Startupitem/M-Audio Firmware Loader" has not been started because it does not have the proper security settings. I tried to install the program and it looks like it partially installed But I have no idea. I am pretty technologically illiterate.
I think I have an iMac G5 - flat screen, white covering. Right now I have OS X 10.5.8 & it's running rather slow. The processor is 2 GHz Intel Core Duo, Memory 512 MB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. I want to upgrade to Snow Leopard 10.6.3 - tried today but says I don't have enough memory. How do I get more memory & what do I need to do it.
I have downloaded 10.6.8, as the software update page stated. When I click "install" it prompted me to restart, however after restarting I'm still on 10.6.2.
I have a mid-2007 MacBook Pro, model A1226, with 4GB RAM. The optical drive has always been a little off, in that CD's written using the MacBook Pro sometimes can't be read on other systems, but it's never had problems reading CDs/DVDs. When I had Fusion installed on this machine I was able to install Windows XP and Windows 7 using the optical drive.Â
I want to do a Bootcamp install of Windows, either XP or 7. I have two original WinXP Pro SP2 installation disks (retail, not OEM) and one set of original Win7 Ultimate installation disks, again retail.Â
I did a clean install of Snow Leopard after reformatting (erasing) the hard disk, and ran software update. Then I ran Boot Camp Assistant and created a bootcamp partition. When I insert an installation disk and click on Start..., after a moment it ejects the disk. Over and over. I repeated this many times, with all of the install disks, and the results were the same. Â
Except once, and only once, it actually started installing WinXP. Per the instructions I had WinXP format the bootcamp partition, but the install hung near the end where it was trying to save settings. Apparently this is a common scenario that some people think is related to having a USB keyboard and mouse connected, but it still hung for me even if I connected a wired keyboard and mouse. Â
Lots of reports of similar problems on the web, and I tried a number of suggestions I found here and elsewhere, including:Attached an external DVD drive. The install DVD doesn't get ejected, but I still get the folder/question mark and failure to reboot for all the installation DVDs. I suspect that my model MBP doesn't handle booting from external optical drives very well, if at all. Make copies of the install DVDs. Although the copies seem to work the same as the originals on my iMac, they produce the same results using both internal and external optical drives.Made a number of different bootable USB sticks, but never found a way to have the required guid partition table at the same time as the Windows boot image, so they weren't bootable on my MacBook Pro.Installed rEFIt and tried using that to boot from USB (still not recognized as a bootable device) and from internal and external drives containing the original or copied installation DVDs. Still get the folder/question mark icon.Â
Generally after clicking on Start Installation the system won't boot from the internal drive, but sometimes holding Option works; other times it just refuses to boot until I've tried it multiple times or booted from the Snow Leopard install disk and adjusted the boot record.Â
Supposedly listening to the drive and tapping on the case works, but not for me. I haven't yet tried loosening the mounting brackets because I'm still looking for a T6 driver, but that's another common suggestion.Â
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Model A1226 4 GB Ram
I bought my mac a few years ago, and i recently swiped it and wiped it clean again, to make it faster, which it has. When i was installing the CD's, the install dic 1 was fine, but when it said to insert disc 2 to continue the installation my mac wasn't reading it. Therefore i just did not install it. Yesterday i downloaded the disc 2 online, but i wanted to know what the contents were of disc 2?
I recently upgraded my Macbook Pro to Snow leopard. About 4 days later, my Mac crashed. When I tried to restart, it came up with the grey screen with apple logo and spinning disc. I have tried all of the resets. I then decided to try and re-boot from the SL install disk. When it asked me to choose a destination volume, however, there was none available. I tried disk utility, but there was no disk available there either. I then went back and tried to use the original install disc that came with the Mac...same results. It appears that my internal hard disk has disappeared. I wonder if i am going to have to replace the hard drive?
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2009), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
