Can't install MAC OS X Lion - Macintosh HD "This disk cannot be used to start up your computer."

Gentlemen:

I have tried everything in this thread to no avail. I still get the same error, I.e. "This disk is used for TimeMachine backups". I tried the partition scheme, got the same error as mephisto8. I could not find the "Backups.backupsdb" file on my HDD. I have a 13" MBP, Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM _AND_ an OCZ Agility 2, 180 GB, with the latest firmware update (1.33). After trying the repartion method, my HDD now is so slow it takes MINUTES to show a menu click! I have reapired permissions, rebooted, etc. No dice. Have you guys heard of any problems with OCZ drives and Lion? Any help would be appreciated. I spent the entire night on a 1 gbps connection to download Lion to get this is the end... Vey frustrating! Thank you very much for ANY help. Have yourselves a wonderful day!

Creating a disk image of my Snow Leopard boot volume. Erasing the partition map and restoring the image back to my hard drive worked. I would imagine some hidden partition was causing trouble. I did have boot camp at one point but removed it awhile ago.

I have a MacBook Pro with third-party (OCZ) SSD and a single paritition on it. Things I've done so far:

1. I've booted from a DVD drive and run disk utility to repair the disk

2. I've tried varying the size of the single partition as suggested in earlier posts here

3. I've run iPartition (from a DVD) to see if there was anything "suspicious" about the drive but everything looked perfectly normal - GUID Partition Table with a single partition (and a small amount of free space after it that can't be used)

Appended is a screen dump from Disk Utility (with the Debug menu enabled and "Show every partition" checked). Can anyone see anything unusual here?

Despite all this I continue to get the "This disk cannot be used to start up your computer," both within Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and from a DVD install of Lion I made from instructions provided earlier here.

I replaced the apple HD with the SSD a few months ago - is there any chance that's the cause of the problem?

It installed without problem on my wife's MacBook Air and it's in the process of installing on my Mac Pro.

I'm really not looking forward to reinstalling everything from scratch so I hope someone else with similar problems finds a solution. In any case, the thought of a complete reinstall is so painful I can wait quite some time before being prepared to do that.

cannot be more agree with you! Still waiting for a solution...

To Matthintz - that would be an easy solution, but if you do that, can you keep using your existing time machine backups? My understanding is that after a full restore, time machine does a full backup. I'd hate to lose all my old backups.

Had the same problem (MBP 15", 500GB SSD, Boot Camp with Win7 in a 50GB partitiion) - tried disk repair, tried partition resize, tried booting from another drive, tried using Lion boot CD image - all were epic fails.

In the end I used VMWare Fusion to import the boot camp partition as a virtual machione file on the Mac partition, then deleted the Boot Camp partitiion and resize the Mac partition. After that everything went fine but I had to give up dual boot capability.

I supposed I could re-create a bootcamp partition now that Lion is running, buyt I haver to go through the whole Win 7 setup again - One painful OS install is enough for me this week.

Everything I have seen seems to be related to the state of the bootable partition. IMO The Lion install should be updated include more robust pre-install verification in order to ensure that the partition(s) config is good for the install instead of leaving the end user at a dead end - This felt a lot like my last 4 Windows OS upgrades.

Deleting Backups.backupdb worked for me, thank you!!!!

Not sure this will help, but my MacPro has an SSD as the OS drive. Lion would not install on it unitl I went in to Disk Utility and enabled Journaling. Then, I had to completely quit out of the installer, then fire it back up, and voila, it now recognized the SSD and I was able to install with no issues.

Lion just finished installing. My Time Machine backup is now in progress and it appears to be continuing where it left off. Time Machine backups do not seem to be interrupted after performing a disk image restore in my case.

Great. What kind of disk image did you use - Super Duper, for example?

I just did a disk image through disk utility. It has to be done with your machine in Target Disk Mode connected to another machine or booting off another external volume like a hard drive that is bootable.

My guess would be using something like CCC or SuperDuper! would cause problems with your time machine backup. Use a image of your drive through disk utility is basically an exact clone without any exception and therefore when its put back onto your drive Time Machine doesn't know any difference.

Perhaps the error message is telling you that you do not have the Lion Recovery HD installed. This is on a small 650Mb partition separate from the OS. If your Disk Utility>Debug>Show all partitions is checked, it should show.

Without this you cannot use "this disk to start your computer" if the OS gives trouble. It is not the normal end product of a Lion installation.

Mind you, I would like to know what Disk0s1 is here, and how to remove it:

Yes. You do not appear to have an EFI partition on that drive.

No. You can start the system just fine without the recovery partition. Without the recovery partition you just cannot use FileVault, and you cannot use the default methods of recoverying and reinstalling the OS.

Then Disk0s1 is the EFI volume. It just shows the importance of a correct installation procedure.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2679758?start=0&tstart=0