Q: Lion wont install because of recovery system failure

I'm not sure what it was cause I delited it but if I alt reboot now it does show me th recovery drive.

The situation looked to me as if disk utility didn't recognise the 2nd partition as it showed only one partition (the start up volume) and boot camp did recognize it and gave an error cause the drive needs to have only 1 partition in macintosh journaled GUID for boot camp to work..

I guess the lion install needs the same condition of a single partition in Mac journals GUID for it to create the recovery drive partition..

Franz_P wrote:

. . .

I guess the lion install needs the same condition of a single partition in Mac journals GUID for it to create the recovery drive partition..

No, it will install on a multi-partition disk; I have 2 installations of Lion, one of Snow Leopard, and a copy of my Snow Leopard Install disc on my internal HD.

The problem seems to be if there's a non-standard or modified BootCamp installation.

No problem. I'm glad the steps were of help.

yea i think you are right.. but for people who do have problems i guess a fix could be to check for these non-standard partitions and consider getting rid of them.. i mean even if that 600mb partition was the recovery drive from my failed install it would be replaced once lion is installed again.. it worked flawlessly afterwards

If you have just the one partition, it sounds like there are files in the partition that Apple does not want to relocate, possibly an open file. I think you need contiguous free space at the end of the partition for BootCamp Assistant and the Lion Installer to work properly. I know that TechTools Pro has a utility to compact a volume/partition. I am pretty sure you cannot compact an active system disk so you will need to create another bootable volume/partition, probably on another physical drive and run the compression tool from that or do the backup/restore as the message suggest. The alternate system disk can be Leopard or Snow Leopard. TechTools Pro does have a downloadable ISO disk image if you want to go that route.

i once had an issue like that and as roosevelt sayed you need everything clear at the end of the drive to add a partition.. that time i defragmented the drive and it worked..

and yes i do think that this prevents os x lion from installing on your drive but i think you can work arround it without having to reformat..

I know it's little consolation, or a super-solid solution; but I had the same problem on my MacPro with Stripped RAID 0 as the main drive (backed up regularly, of course). It has been telling all day that it cannot install because it cannot create recovery system. But as I was looking for solutions on this thread on my laptop and repeatedly restarting my MacPro....... it finally installed, after 9-10 failures and restarts. Go figure. 

My solution that worked:

I have a same problem last night while installing Lion.

The problem is with Bootcamp.

1. Backup all important data from Windows partition (I just copy MY documents to external disc...)

2.Open DiskUtility (Aplications/Utilitys)

3.Click on Bootcamp partition and hit - on bottom

4.Now you will have empty space there. Hit + on bottom and add Mac Journaled parititon (instead of ex bootcamp)

4.When it apear, select it and then hit - on bottom.

5.Now, your primary partition should expand on whole disc including space previosly ocupied with Bootcam/New Mac partition. If not, try to expand primary partition by pulling parititon border to bottom.

6. Click Apply.

Now, your instalation should go fine.

(start new instalation in Applications folder).

Hope this will help!

Interesting that the Lion install worked on your second attempt. I had a similar experience although my "inbetween steps" were these:

1) Run Disk Utility to verify permissions on the HFS+ partition

2) Boot into Windows on the Boot Camp partition and run CHKDSK /F

3) Reboot a few times

4) Run Winclone to make a backup of the Bootcamp partition

Hi guys I seem to be having the same problem as the original post. I'm trying to install on my Core 2 Duo MacBook but I keep getting the same error message even after updating, verifying disk, reparing permissions etc.

I've never partitioned the disk or used bootcamp or anything like that and don't really understand the GUID stuff either! Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheeeeers

MITCHFIELDER wrote:

. . .

I've never partitioned the disk or used bootcamp or anything like that and don't really understand the GUID stuff either! Any help would be much appreciated!

Via Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder), click the main line for the drive in the sidebar, and see what's shown at the bottom:

Thanks for replying. What exactly am I looking for? I dont want any partitions for Windows etc, just want lion to work! haha. This is what I see for disk utility:

That's exactly what you should see; GUID Partition table.

Try selecting the partition (Macintosh HD) and clicking the Verify Disk (not permissions) button.   See #6 in Using Disk Utility for details.

Let us know the results.

I tried all the verify/repair things earlier and still no luck :/ These are the results from the last Verify Disk

Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”

Performing live verification.

Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

Checking extents overflow file.

Checking catalog file.

Checking multi-linked files.

Checking catalog hierarchy.

Checking extended attributes file.

Checking volume bitmap.

Checking volume information.

The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK.