[schalliol]

FedEx dropped off my Family Pack disc today and when I try to install on my MacBook Pro 2.16 Core 1 Duo the installer shows a blank screen that says "Where do you want to install Mac OS X?" and disk utility from the installer doesn't even see the partitions. I have a boot camp partition in there and I think I'm going to restore the volume. The partitions both show up when holding option and the system boots as normal.

[Art Vandelay]

Try running Disk First Aid.

[schalliol]

Ugg, that didn't help! Now what?!

[ginoledesma]

This happened to me, too. This is what I did:

1. Run Disk Utilitiy from the Installer (it's under one of the menus)
2. Click on your hard drive. Chances are, your hard drive is listed, but NOT your Volume (e.g. Macintosh HD)
3. If your volume isn't listed, click on the "Partition" tab. Change the Volume Scheme from "Current" to "1 Partition" then back to "Current". When I did this, the volume showed up below the hard drive icon.
4. Once that's done, quit Disk Utility and go back to the Installer.

Dunno why that happened. I have a MacBook Pro C2D (3,1). I kinda half-panicked when running into this problem.

My first install was botched -- straigth upgrade. Now I know to always do Archive and Install.

[schalliol]

Originally Posted by Art Vandelay 

Try running Disk First Aid.

I'll try in Tiger. Leopard's Disk Utility (does first aid) doesn't see the partition, so I can't do that off the disc.

[schalliol]

This worked for me, Thanks!!!

Originally Posted by ginoledesma 

This happened to me, too. This is what I did:

1. Run Disk Utilitiy from the Installer (it's under one of the menus)
2. Click on your hard drive. Chances are, your hard drive is listed, but NOT your Volume (e.g. Macintosh HD)
3. If your volume isn't listed, click on the "Partition" tab. Change the Volume Scheme from "Current" to "1 Partition" then back to "Current". When I did this, the volume showed up below the hard drive icon.
4. Once that's done, quit Disk Utility and go back to the Installer.

Dunno why that happened. I have a MacBook Pro C2D (3,1). I kinda half-panicked when running into this problem.

My first install was botched -- straigth upgrade. Now I know to always do Archive and Install.

[WinsOBoogi]

I'm having the same problems, but clicking from "current" to "one" and back to "current" doesn't seem to take care of the problem. BUt you're right -- the volume doesn't show, just the HD.

So strange.

[ginoledesma]

Originally Posted by WinsOBoogi 

I'm having the same problems, but clicking from "current" to "one" and back to "current" doesn't seem to take care of the problem. BUt you're right -- the volume doesn't show, just the HD.

So strange.

If that doesn't work for you, there's a way to do it using the Terminal. What seems to be happening is that the volume where your OS resides isn't being mounted.

Try this:

1. Launch Terminal
2. Type: diskutil list. Something like the following will show:
   [codex]
   Poseidon:~ gledesma$ diskutil list
   /dev/disk0
   #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
   0: GUID_partition_scheme *111.8 Gi disk0
   1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk0s1
   2: Apple_HFS Gino 111.5 Gi disk0s2
   [/codex]
   
   Note: The actual number after disk might vary -- e.g. disk1, disk2, etc.
   
   From here you can get the specific block device (hard drive + partition number) which contains your Mac OS X install. This is a combination of disk + the number following it shown above + s + the partition number in the list. In the above case, it's disk0s2. You can think of "s" as slice, so disk0s2 means "slice #2 of disk0".
   
3. Whatever # is listed for the name of your volume (e.g. Macintosh HD; it's "Gino" in my case), that's what you'll want mounted.
   
   [codex]
   ls -l /Volumes
   mkdir -p /Volumes/Gino
   mount_hfs /dev/disk0s2 /Volumes/Gino
   [/codex]
   
   Note: The first list lists the directories in the "/Volumes" directory, where Mac OS X normally mounts stuff. If the name of your volume already appears there, you can skip the second line. Otherwise, run the second line. What that does is to create a directory for where your volume will be mounted. Change the name to whatever the name of your volume is (e.g. "Macintosh HD" in that's the name. Use quotes so the space is preserved). The third line actually mounts the volume for you.
   
4. Quit Terminal to return to the Installer. The volume *should* appear at this point. If not, go to Disk Utility and perform the steps listed earlier.

I don't know why this is happening, though. I didn't save the startup logs of the Installer as it was booting up. I was suspecting a failing drive of mine (or it was spinning up late). But if it's happening to a lot of people, must be an Installer issue...

[WinsOBoogi]

Originally Posted by ginoledesma 

If that doesn't work for you, there's a way to do it using the Terminal. What seems to be happening is that the volume where your OS resides isn't being mounted.

Try this:[list=#][*]Launch Terminal[*]Type: diskutil list. Something like the following will show:
[codex]
Poseidon:~ gledesma$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *111.8 Gi disk0
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Gino 111.5 Gi disk0s2
[/codex]

Many thanks -- one problem, though. My Macintosh HD isn't showing up when I type that in. I have a 100GB harddrive, and I get "93.2 gi" from "disk0" and I get 200 Mi from disk0s1.

Should I just type what you've laid out as the next step (I assume that this would be s2), or should I try something else?

Thanks!
- Brad

[WinsOBoogi]

Yeah, that didn't work.

Strange - when I go into "partition", and go from current to 1, there's no volume information. It just says ,"Untitled 1." I obviously don't click "apply," as that would wipe my HD, correct?

What do you think? Am I ready for a HD reformatting?

[ginoledesma]

It doesn't show any other disk other than disk0 (e.g. disk1 or disk2)? And within disk0, all it shows is just disk0s1? That's even scarier than my case. Hmm...

[WinsOBoogi]

It's not all-too-scary, as my system works totally fine in Tiger.

I'm backing up everything now Then it looks like it's time for a little reformatting, no?

[ginoledesma]

Originally Posted by WinsOBoogi 

It's not all-too-scary, as my system works totally fine in Tiger.

I'm backing up everything now Then it looks like it's time for a little reformatting, no?

Backup: definitely.
Reformatting: You'll have to recreate the partition from within Disk Utility in Leopard. That will get Mac OS X to "see" a volume for installation. I wish it didn't have to come to that, though. ;-)

[WinsOBoogi]

I'm going to take the "zen" approach to this, and say that my HD was getting full anyway, and what better way to remove clutter!

Many thanks for your help on this one -- I appreciate the effort that we gave it

Originally Posted by ginoledesma 

This happened to me, too. This is what I did:

1. Run Disk Utilitiy from the Installer (it's under one of the menus)
2. Click on your hard drive. Chances are, your hard drive is listed, but NOT your Volume (e.g. Macintosh HD)
3. If your volume isn't listed, click on the "Partition" tab. Change the Volume Scheme from "Current" to "1 Partition" then back to "Current". When I did this, the volume showed up below the hard drive icon.
4. Once that's done, quit Disk Utility and go back to the Installer.

Dunno why that happened. I have a MacBook Pro C2D (3,1). I kinda half-panicked when running into this problem.

My first install was botched -- straigth upgrade. Now I know to always do Archive and Install.

My volume "Mac HD" was already listed so this didn't do anything. Should I call AppleCare to resolve this? This is not good, I was hoping this would be a smooth install.

[DavidHossack]

Had this too and was a little worried.

It may be time related-maybe it is repairing the drive or something since I was messing around-after rebooting for the third time and while checking the installer's "Startup Disk" options my main HD turned up-had to work out how to get out of picking the startup disk without restarting. Installed and running fine now if a little slow on my 1.67GHz PBG4 (Hi-Res). It is of course indexing AND doing a TM backup.

[TheoCryst]

I'm having the same issue... I tried reformatting or repartitioning the partition, but it insisted that the resource was busy. I'll try the Current-1-Current thing, and manually mounting the partition, and hopefully fill you in from Leopard.

[TheoCryst]

So, for those having trouble, here's how I fixed things:

1) Boot off original Tiger restore disk
2) Using Disk Utility, format the hard drive (just the partition is fine if you are running Boot Camp)
3) Switch to Leopard

And that took care of everything! Granted, it involves losing all your data, but clean installs are always a good thing anyway, right?

[Gee4orce]

I had some disk weirdness too - the installer said it couldn't install on my MacBook's internal HD because the partition scheme was the wrong kind. Apparently, I was somehow using my disk in Apple Partition Scheme, which is not even supposed to be bootable on Intel Macs ! :o I had to reformat the disk to the Intel compatible one (GUID) before I could proceed.

Unfortunately, that meant no archive and install for me, but a complete clean install

[83caddy16v]

my MacBook Pro did the same thing; installer did not see the OSX partition nor the WinXP partition. I ran disk utility, it did see them, whew! I did a verify on the OSX drive and restarted the installer and it saw it the second time.

I had no issues with our Intel iMac with the same OSX & XP partitions.

[Cold Warrior]

Some of you may be having a firmware issue, as mentioned on MacFixIt:

The second point is important because, as we discovered earlier during the firmware update kerfuffle, many Intel Mac users are booting from APM disks and don't realize it. They will be unable to install Leopard onto such a disk (without repartitioning it, which involves erasing all the data).

About midpoint on the main page: Mac OS X and iPod Troubleshooting, Support, and Help - MacFixIt
And a link from the article:Tales of the MacBook Pro Firmware Update - MacFixIt

[mrwalker]

I'm seeing this problem too, trying to install from ADC download version which was just issued (and is apparently identical to the retail one).

I have the 10.5 installer 'restored' using Disk Copy to a partition on an external USB disk and am attempting an archive & install over my MacBook Pro's internal disk - the installer just doesn't see it. I've also tried this on a MacBook with the same results. I don't remember seeing this with any of the previous beta builds, but I wasn't trying to install onto the internal disk.

The only thing I can think of is that both my MacBook Pro and the MacBook were used with BootCamp Beta on 10.4 to resize the original partition, install Windows for a while, then merged back to one partition again. Perhaps in the process of resizing the partition becomes unusable by the 10.5 installer.

I'm currently cloning everything to an external disk, then I'll try erasing the MacBook Pro's internal disk & doing a clean install. For the MacBook, I'll try cloning the copy on the backup disk back to the internal disk again to do an archive & install.

[CharlesS]

I encountered a variant of this issue - the installer did see my internal hard drive (which had Tiger on it at the time), but when I tried to Archive and Install the OS onto it, it sat at the barber-pole progress bar for a while, and then told me an unexpected error occurred and it would have to restart. So I restarted, and upon booting into the installer a second time, I noticed the same thing you guys are seeing - the installer didn't recognize my hard drive, and Disk Utility showed no partitions. I panicked a bit, thinking the installer had hosed my hard drive (although I have a backup of everything, it's still nervewracking when something like that happens), and booted back into 9A559, which I had running on a partition on an external drive, where I noticed that my internal hard disk, which had been working fine before from 9A559, now wouldn't mount there either, just like in the installer! Getting worried now, I rebooted into my rescue partition, which was running Tiger. This partition was able to see my internal hard disk, so I pulled out my copy of DiskWarrior and ran it on the drive. DiskWarrior fixed a few minor-looking things, and then immediately crashed (!), but upon rebooting into the Leopard installer, it was now able to see my internal disk and Archive and Install on it, although its time estimates were wildly inaccurate (particularly at the end, where it got stuck on "less than a minute" for over 15 minutes, leading me to wonder if it was hung).

Worst. Installer. Ever.

I tried waiting as suggested on the Apple support forum and my drive eventually showed up: Leopard Hard Drive Install Bug

[Zardo]

Just wanted to suggest an alternate solution that worked for me (although it was completely inadvertent):

I was having the same issue - Internal HFS volume not showing up on the Leopard install screen - and started to work through ginoledesma's well-explained solution. I decided to simplify things for myself by renaming my drive from 'Macintosh HD' to 'Macintosh_HD' (to avoid dealing with a space character in Terminal.)

Lo and behold, when I restarted and ran the installer, the drive showed up. I didn't have to go through the Terminal mounting process at all. The evidence suggests that it was just the act of removing the space from the Volume name - or perhaps just renaming it. Either way, it worked for me.

Did an Archive and Install, now posting from 10.5. So far so good!

[sra]

When I had this problem, I fixed it by running DiskUtility from the installer. I have two disks on the machine, one with two partitions (the second one for Windows), and the other with just one. The installer only saw the second drive, the one destined to be a backup drive, and neither of the partitions on my main drive. This was also what showed up in DiskUtility: both drives as devices, but only the second one with a file system. What I did was to select the drive it saw (the backup), and unmount that. Immediately a partition on my main drive showed up -- the Windows partition. I then unmounted that, and the right one (my Mac OS X partition on the main drive) appeared. I shut down DiskUtility at this point and the install proceeded with no further problems.

[Don Pickett]

For the record, I had a similar issue. The first install of 10.5 failed with a "software error," which was weird, because the 10.5 install disc I was using was fresh out of the package. When I tried again, the installer didn't see my main drive. I panicked for a few minutes, cursed Apple, calmed down and went into Disk Utility. I repaired permissions, verified the drive, and then the installer worked.

Freaked me out for a but, though.

[wr11]

Had the same issue... it worked fine after I waited about 10 minutes when the drive magically showed up.

Note I did check the drive and the partition type after my first attempt. Everything was fine and didn't have any problems.

[mhuterer]

I also had this problem, and while none of the previous posts helped me completely, together they suggested a strategy that ended up working.

Firstly: I encountered this problem when I (unknowingly) used Windows XP SP1 and tried to install Windows (via BootCamp) on my new MacBook. I effectively "bricked" my machine, since you're apparently only able to do this with Windows XP SP2. I feel the fact that a user can unknowingly do this and accidentally use SP1 is a huge problem. After my experience, I was unable to reinstall Mac OS X on my harddrive - the volumes were effectively unavailable, and the machine was "bricked".

What I did to solve this: I have another (older) iMac G5 that played a pivotal role. The first thing that I had to do was install MacFuse and NTFS-3G on the iMac (you can find these by doing a google search). This allowed my iMac to write to NTFS partitions (which was what my partition in my MacBook became after BootCamp completely screwed it up). Without this, I would have been unable to repair my computer using Mac's native "Disk Utility" (because Mac OS X cannot write/erase/format NTFS partitions - it can only read it!). You might be able to get away with this step by installing some other 3rd party disk utility software, but I didn't want to pay for more software.

I then booted my iMac G5 into Target mode (by holding "T" on the keyboard during booting). A firewire symbol appeared on the screen. I then plugged a firewire cable from my iMac G5 to my MacBook (which was the machine that was 'bricked'). I then turned on the MacBook, and simultaneously held 'Option' until a choice of booting off the iMac's Harddrive came on my screen. I then chose to boot my MacBook off of the iMac G5's harddrive.

My MacBook then booted off of my iMac's drive, and I saw my iMac's desktop on my MacBook. I then used Disk Utility, and was finally able to actually repair the partitions, and create a new one.

The fundamental problem until that point was that before I installed MacFuse and NTFS-3G, I was unable to repair my MacBook's drive, because the drive was now "seen" as being in NTFS format (which OS X natively cannot write to). What MacFuse/NTFS-3G allowed my MacBook to do (when booted "through" my iMac), was to be able to write to my previously unwriteable MacBook drive, and correct the damage.

So, I ended up making a new partition on my HD, which then allowed me to boot my MacBook (with the OS X installation disk inside), and finally be able to select a partition to install onto.

I hope this helps someone - I usually don't post, but the messages I read helped me out, and I hope that I'm also able to help someone else out.

Best Regards,

Mko.

[analogika]

It would probably also have worked to boot the MacBook into Target Disk Mode and just hook that up to the iMac (with MacFUSE and NTFS-3G installed).

[Art Vandelay]

You don't need to be able to write to a NTFS partition to be able to delete it with Disk Utility. You could have simply booted from your OS X install disc and fixed your drive with Disk Utility from the install disc.

Further, Win XP pre-SP2 won't brick your drive. It will only do that if you try to install Windows onto your Mac partition. Plenty of people have managed to install pre-SP2 versions of XP on their Macs with Boot Camp. Just look at the Alternative OS forum to see all the people that have done it and wonder why Windows isn't working right..