Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Lion wont install because of recovery system failure

I have about 32 GB of space left on my hard drive running the latest version of Snow Leopard. Lion won't install because it says it can't create a recovery system. How do I fix this?

MacBook Pro, 17", 4GB RAM

Posted on Jul 20, 2011 8:51 AM

Reply
37 replies

Jul 20, 2011 9:13 AM in response to VirtualCheese

The Recovery HD (partition, actually) is "carved out" of the end of your OSX partition. It may be that some files are in the last few hundred MBs of the partition, so Lion can't use the space.


I'd recommend waiting a bit, to see what other users find.


You may have to make a "clone" of your OSX partition, boot up from it, erase the OSX partition, and clone back to it. That will put everything in the first part of the partition.

Jul 20, 2011 11:11 AM in response to VirtualCheese

I have the same problem. I don't have bootcamp nor any other partitions. I ran Disk Utility repair permissions before doing the install.


diskutil gives me the following:

diskutil list /dev/disk0

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *250.1 GB disk0

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 249.7 GB disk0s2

Jul 20, 2011 5:48 PM in response to VirtualCheese

You might try running the BootCamp Assistant to see if it has an issue creating a partition at the end of your disk drive. If there is not an issue creating the Windows partition, remove it using Disk Utility and see how the Lion installation behaves.


I do not think my installation created the recovery disk, because I have a BootCamp partition and I used TechTools Pro to create its version of a recovery disk. All I got from the Lion installer was a warning that some features would not be available. It let me go ahead and install Lion.

Jul 20, 2011 8:43 PM in response to VirtualCheese

Hey all..


Rosevelt Jones was right in my case.. So thanks rosevelt for the hint..:] Boot camp assistant wouldn't allow me to partition the disk and said that the disk needs to be formatted as macintosh journaled GUID which mine is.. I then used drive genius to look at the partitions and found one that was about 600MB and said that the format is unknown.. I deleted that partition which I suppose was a leftover from an earlier windows partition I had on that drive or something and now the installation works.. I would try checking your partitions with another program not disk utilities or boot camp assistant as they didn't show the actual partitions on my drive properly..

Jul 20, 2011 9:05 PM in response to Pondini

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..

Lion wont install because of recovery system failure

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple ID.