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Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard, Win 7 & Ubuntu, can't upgrade to Lion

I have new 13" macbook pro with Snow Leopard on it. With a combination of boot camp and some disc partitioning trickery, I got windows 7 and ubuntu on it as well. Furthermore I also have a shared data (fat32) partition on the machine (so 4 main partitions - win,mac,linux,shared - plus swap partition, efi, etc).


I just download Lion and I'm trying to start the installer, but when it asks me which partition I want to install it on, all options are greyed out and the Macintosh HD partition says somethign to the effect of "this disc cannot be used to start the computer". Is there any way for me to get lion installed without having to erase all my extra partitions and start this whole agonizing process over again?

Posted on Aug 8, 2011 4:50 PM

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1 reply

Aug 8, 2011 7:25 PM in response to Happenstance Productions

You may be out of luck without formatting your HDD. See this article from Macworld:

(At least Recovery HD should be created. In our testing, it appears this special partition is created only when you install Lion onto an internal drive formatted with a GUID partition scheme. In addition, that internal drive must initially have only a single partition; or be a multi-partition drive that was partitioned by Boot Camp Assistant and not further modified afterwards. So not everyone will get this useful feature. Apple has confirmed some of these restrictions.)



Also, see these Apple KB articles:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4649

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1600

Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard, Win 7 & Ubuntu, can't upgrade to Lion

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