Hard drive not recognised

And waiting 5 or 10 minutes fixed the problem. The hard drive showed up and Leopard is now installing. Thanks for the help. I wonder how widespread this problem is...Apple may have quite a few unhappy users around 6 p.m. if people don't find this thread.

Same thing happened to me on my MBP. Everything has always run so smoothly that I started to worry when it didn't show up right away.

Tried Disk Utility. Drive showed up, but with no details. I exited out of that and decided to take the advice of others and wait it out.

About 5 minutes later, the drive showed up. I guess people were right when they said patience is key.

I had this same problem on my late 2006 iMac Core 2 Duo. After a few nervous minutes of disk checking in Tiger and a bunch of rebooting, I found this discussion and the advice worked; I just left the Leopard Disk Utility open for a few minutes and the disk popped right up.

If I had been listening for it, a clue might have been that you could hear the internal hard drive working away for those minutes until it appeared. Wonder what it was doing.

Hey guys, just wanted to post and say thanks.
I was having the same issue. Freaking out haha... not good.
Anyway, upon the 3rd restart right away leopard picked up my hard drive,
but I'm convinced that if it hadn't, waiting 10 minutes would have definitely done the trick for me.
Thanks again for all the help!

Same issue with my 1st Gen MacBook Pro. It took 15 minutes to see the drive.

Now the question is - is this problem over and done with, or will it cause problems later in the install? I'm at the 'checking installation DVD' stage.

It worries me somewhat that the Startup Disk tool on the Leopard DVD also did not see the disk.

I have the same problem, so Disk Utility it open, and I am waiting. I hear my harddrive spinning away in there. Wonder what it's doing

Yup. Just had to wait. It appeared.

Solution is "simple"

Boot from Tiger DVD... repartition the drive to one partition
Reboot and put in Leopard DVD
install

before that of course you have to scramble for an HD the same size as your internal HD, back everything up with CCC or SuperDuper. after install restore using Migration Assistant, all the time cursing and swearing and kicking everything around you... They should just put 2-3 antacids in every package of Leopard....

This has happened to me on all 3 machines I installed Leopard on (2 MacBooks and 1 iBook G4)...

Aaaargh!

Add me to the list. 1.8GHz Intel Mac Mini. Internal drive partition is not recognized by install DVD. Did a repair disk with Tiger boot disk... tried again, same story. Now I will try letting it sit and hopefully the drive shows up.

Update: After 7 minutes my drive showed up and install is in progress. Thanks to everyone who provided the tip.

Message was edited by: Mark Mc.

Well it seems it's just the wait that's required.
Can I ask though - why are people using Tiger DVD to scan their disk when they could use Leopard DVD?

Or does your Leopard pre-install Disk Utility also not see the drive? (my Leopard Disk Utility DID see the drive, but the installer did not)

Because Disk Utility on Leopard DVD could see the drive, but not see any partitions, so you couldn't run repair. Perhaps after the 7 minutes wait it would have worked, but i didn't know you had to wait until after I did it.

I'm having the exact same issue, trying not to panic 😉

I've got the 10.5 installer booted, and Disk Utility open waiting for it recognize my hard drive.

Update: the disk was recognized 12 min and 45 sec after opening Disk Utility. Finally, woo hoo!

i'm having the same issue too. i've got a white iMac core 2 duo... i'm gonna try out the waiting thing... gosh, this is frustrating

I had that too yesterday on two of my Macs, quite a windows experience. So now to the explanation and solution i found. I started the terminal and poked around and it seems that Leopard does a fsck (scan) of the filesystems in the background while starting, if that is not finished or hangs, the drive does not appear in the installation and is "busy" if you try to use disk tool.
If youre up to it and just want to reformat anyway, open terminal (you can do that during the installation from the pulldowns) do a
ps auxww | grep fsck
get the id of the fsck process and do a
kill <id>
close the terminal app, the install program starts again and the drive appears and can/must be reformatte. If you dont want to loose your data you could
a) wait for the fsck to finish,
b) boot Tiger and try to repair there
c) or use any other means to try to repair your drive to a point where the 10.5 fsck wont hickup.

Its not obvious what or why the installation hangs, would it be so hard to check for the fsck during installation and tell the user ?

TomBille explained it quite well. I had the same problem and tried to find out what's actually going on.
When Leopard checks for available installation volumes it does
a fsck -q on all volumes. That is a quickcheck to find out if the filesystem is dirty/clean. If the filesystem is dirty than Leopard does a full filesystem-check on that volume. This process is running in the background and makes the volume dissappear from diskutility (ressource busy). The filesystem check can take up to 20 minutes depending on the size, speed and number of files on your drive.
Once the filesystem check is finished, the volume should reappear in the diskutility and be listed in the available volumes pane. However depending on the results of the file-system-check there are now two options:

1) Filesystem-check went fine. fsck could repair all errors. You can do an upgrade install.
2) Filessystem-check failed. The volume will be only available for a clean install. No upgrade install possible.

As it turns out the filesystem check on Leopard works different than on Tiger. I saw quite a few volumes that had no errors on Tiger, but were checked under Leopard and fsck found errors there.
That means: Even if your filesystem appears to be clean (under Tiger) it could be that you can not do an upgrade install (in some rare cases).

All in all that could result in a quite bad installing experience. Apple should really have included a progress bar when fsck is running (rather than doing it in the background) and letting the user know what is going on. Also fsck seems to be more critical under Leopard, which leads to more installation problems.