There was a problem installing Mac OS X

Here's the crucial bit. I got myself into this boat. After wiping my entire drive, I wondered "HOW can it possibly be finding any remnants of Lion?" The answer is PRAM. You need to reset your PRAM.

Follow this article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

After doing this, and restarting, I got a different error and a window displaying a log containing details of the failed installation. It doesn't matter. Just select a new startup disk, or do the "hold the Option key during boot" trick to select your USB install image, and when you restart, you'll get the normal "clean installer" options.

Brett

I think you miss the point. Firstly, within a very short time, users will no longer be able to buy Snow Leopard. And buyers of new Macs don't have SL. Without this PRAM trick, there is no way to recover from a truly messed up Lion install.

EVEN re-installing SL WILL NOT fix it (I know, I did it). Because the Lion installer keeps information in PRAM. After you've installed Snow Leopard (which will work fine), when you run the Lion installer, and the Lion installer restarts the system, it will find the bad PRAM state and will not continue.

Hello,

I can also prove that the fix described in this article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

helped to re-install my iMac (2011 model). In my scenario I installed OS X Lion (10.7.3.) from netboot (netinstall) onto a USB drive connected to the iMac.

To get the Lion installer I used the trick to reinstall a Mac from Internet without Recovery partition.

Cheers

Robert

austingaijin wrote:

I think you miss the point. Firstly, within a very short time, users will no longer be able to buy Snow Leopard. And buyers of new Macs don't have SL. Without this PRAM trick, there is no way to recover from a truly messed up Lion install.

EVEN re-installing SL WILL NOT fix it (I know, I did it). Because the Lion installer keeps information in PRAM. After you've installed Snow Leopard (which will work fine), when you run the Lion installer, and the Lion installer restarts the system, it will find the bad PRAM state and will not continue.

Reset Pram, Reinstall SL

Clearly he was trying to upgrade to Lion, because he wants to use Lion. Just because you don't like Lion, doesn't mean others don't. Or are you saying there is some technical reason to install SL before Lion?

austingaijin wrote:

Clearly he was trying to upgrade to Lion, because he wants to use Lion. Just because you don't like Lion, doesn't mean others don't. Or are you saying there is some technical reason to install SL before Lion?

If you are not running 10.6.7 or 10.6.8 you can't connect to the App Store so you can't download 10.7 (Lion), or did you miss that part?

Csound1, you really just like to argue don't you? That is actually not true. I have two computers, on the first one I installed Lion via the App Store, then I burned a Lion DVD following Apple's instructions, then I performed a clean install of Lion on the second computer. It was the second computer that had this same problem. You can encounter this issue whether you are upgrading OR performing a clean install using Lion on a DVD or USB memory stick.

Regardless, it seems my advise has helped several people, and for that I am glad.

austingaijin, thank you! Clearing the PRAM worked. I tried everyway possible and kept getting the same 2 errors, no-recovery issue and the failed osx install one. Cleared pram and was able to install OSX Lion any of the ways, dvd, usb, hd-recovery. Thank You!

Ha, won't give it up Csound1, eh? We're a business, we use Macs for testing, we often wipe and clean install machines. We did it on 10.6 (format and re-install), now we do it with Lion. Not everyone uses their computer exactly like Csound1, can you imagine?!

I have the same problem, as I downloaded MAC OS X Lion from MAC APPSTORE, having 10 gigabyte freespace on my Macintosh HD, during installation the system halts and cannot go further after hours and when restarted cannot go for MAC and goes for my Bootcamp partition OS.

When I press OPTION, I could select from 3 partitions, MAC OS, MAC OS Recovery and Bootcamp.

The first one shows a not responding revolving icon.

In MAC OS Recovery the below error is shown and system restarts:

There was a problem installing "Mac OS X" Try reinstalling

BUT THE DIFFERENCE IS: I did it to Upgrade my Snow Leopard, not a clean install, and I don't want to all my data get wiped out, please help if this solution works for me.

Please Help

THANK YOU!! PRAM reset worked for me too!!! I had made the bootable DVD and wiped my hard drive clean. I did not want to go all the way back to Snow Leopard either (sounds like that would not have fixed it anyways).

Doing my fresh Lion install right now, and it only takes 15~20 min.

Worked perfectly!!

PRAM works!

After reseting the PRAM, and plug in the USB (I made it with a 16GB HP flash drive), it automatically loads into the page of language selection, then pops up "Install Lion", it takes about 5 mins for the initial installation, I believe its copying the necessary installation files into the HD, a clean isntall of Lion, here we go!

I got the problem is because I tried to load the "Mac Lion Installer App" from desktop, but realise the installation starts automatically without notice of Disk Utitlties for formating the disk to be cleaned. Therefore I abort the installation and plug in the "home made Lion installer" and it keep crashing...i believe there was some initialized commands set at the reboot and push me away from loading new installer image, PRAM works!

This also worked for me on a MacBook Pro. I wiped the HDD that had 10.6.8 on it and I was installing from a Lion DVD. I got the "Installation Failed. Try Reinstalling" error and it would not give any options to even try again without restarting. I reset the PRAM and it went right into the installation process. Great post.

iBlink wrote:

I reset the PRAM and it went right into the installation process.

It amazes me that people still never come here and search the forums for an answer instaed of waiting for someone else to post with their problem and then jump on the thread like it's a totally new issue. The answer has been here since Lion was first released, if you'd bother to use the search field.

Cheers