Cannot Install: 'Select Destination' is BLANK

I'm having exactly the same issue on my PowerBook G4. I've successfully installed it on my MacBook Pro and a couple of older Macs but the Powerbook hard drive isn't recognised.

Had a couple of people reply to me suggesting fixes which I'm going to try...

Have a read and see if any of this helps

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5837833#5837833

real_mav wrote:
Anyone know what's going on?

Have you waited several minutes for the drive(s) to appear? See Mac OS X 10.5: Installer destination window does not show drives for an explanation for why the installation window may be empty for a while.

Also, what file system(s) are installed on the volume(s) of your drive(s)? Leopard requires a Mac OS Extended (HFS+) file system, preferably journaled, for installation. Mac OS X 10.5 cannot be installed on a UFS-formatted volume, as the poorly named Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Installing on a UFS-formatted volume article explains.

Check if hard disk name ("Macintosh HD") contains strange characters. My hard disk was named "Macintosh HD" (apple character + Macintosh HD) and Leopard update was not able to see the hard drive. After renaming with a more serious Macintosh HD, all works fine.

I too was seeing this scenario... and it was quite worrisome.
But fear not - all that is required is a little patience.
It took my black MacBook (Aug) a few minutes (under 5 - which seems like an eternity on something that is usually light switch automatic) to locate the target HD. But it eventually did and the install went smoothly.

Good luck & have fun.

When installing Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, destination volumes may not appear in the installation window for a while, even though the volumes are visible while started from Mac OS X 10.4 or in Disk Utility.

Products affected

Mac OS X 10.5
Solution

Wait a few minutes for the volume(s) to appear.

The Mac OS X 10.5 installer window does not show hard drives that are still being checked in the background, and there is no status indicator regarding this. The larger the disk volume, the longer it may take for this to complete. After the disk check has finished, the drive(s) will appear and be available for installation.


Advanced: fsck status check

Advanced users who want to check fsck status can follow these steps:

Open Terminal from the Utilities menu.
Execute this command:

ps auxww | grep fsck

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306861

This might help

It's also strange when the install odometer says ... minutes to go and is blank for quite a while.
Also the "time to complete" sometimes increases 🙂