I try to install Mountain Lion and I can't. It says "This disk cannot be used to start up your computer"

I'm having the same problem, and have tried all the suggested solutions.

Here's a screenshot of what I'm seeing:

http://cloud.jtmkrueger.com/image/063c3X2e0925

Any other suggestions?

Here I tried to make another partition like souloxide suggested:

http://cloud.jtmkrueger.com/image/3j0X3p3X052H

Still no result. Here's what the partitioning lools like:

http://cloud.jtmkrueger.com/image/3j0X3p3X052H

thanks in advance for any advice!

woops, here's the second screenshot:

http://cloud.jtmkrueger.com/image/093y1914261H

sorry!

Hmmm... Not 100% on this but seems that your macintosh hd 2 partition has a blue area? I think that means there are some files/folders in that partition.. Did you perform Erase Free Space on that partition? Try both Erase and Erase free space.. I remember on my 2nd partition it was just all white.

Also, did you reduce the size of the original macintosh hd? If you did.. It looks like you may need to reduce it a little bit more??

Other than that.. I know it's frustrating but don't lose temper/patience.. I almost resorted to reformatting my HD. I'm sure apple is already looking into this..

For those of you that are still having problems, I found a solution that worked for me, although it took a little while through saving and copying.

Basically I just cloned my OS X partition onto an external drive using SuperDuper (I imagine TimeMachine would work too), then I erased my partition and restored (or copied) it back to the partition. If nothing else works for people and you don't mind spending a little time without access to your computer, it might be worth a try.

Good luck!

Hi,

Regarding this thread:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3926

I had to accomplish this step in order to successfully upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion 10.7.5

Everything worked great, but I had to re-sized my unique partition Macintosh HD from 640,14 GB to 637,66 GB

Now Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 is working great and when I lead on disk utitly and try re-sized the Macintosh HD

partition from 637,66 GB to 640,14 GB I just don´t see than the size textbox increase the figure,

so the question is:

¿What should I do to restore partition on his original size?

Thank you very much in advance.

AppleMVP wrote:

. . .

¿What should I do to restore partition on his original size?

It won't go all the way back to the original size, as the Recovery HD requires a few hundred MBs.

To get back as much as possible, instead of typing a number in the Size box, drag the lower-right corner of the partition down to the bottom of the diagram. See the blue box in #4 of Using Disk Utility.

I dragged the lower-right corner of the partition but it seems is already at the bottom, it get stuck on 637,66 GB.

I did run iPartition and precisely I see the Recovery HD but I also see 1,51 GB of Free Space,

¿is there any way to recover this free space?

Thank you very much in advance.

I don't use iPartition, so am not sure what it's showing you.

Can you tell where the 1.5 GB is? That's pretty small, but see if there's a gap anywhere on Disk Utility's diagram, something like this, only much, much smaller:

Disk Utility always shows some space between partitions, so it may not be easy to see the difference.

Apparently, it's not immediately below your OSX partition, so it won't be easy to use it. You'd have to either expand whatever partition is above it, or delete and re-create the partition below it.

Yes of course,

I think you´re right, it should be somewhat like a bug or anything, but figures don´t lie.

Be aware than I´ve just upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion, and had to do that but

instead of 128mb I re-sized over 3Gb.

Ah, you don't have multiple partitions -- I thought you did.

The size of the partition won't equal the total size of the drive; nowhere does either display show 1.51 "free" -- it's just the difference between the gross size of the drive and the net space you can use (actually, you can't use all of what's shown in the partition, either, as the directory structure takes at least a few hundred MBs).

What those displays don't show are the sizes of the partition map, Recovery HD (partition), and EFI boot partition. I don't know if spare blocks are included, either.

I don't know of any way to see the size of the partition map or spare blocks. The EFI boot partition is at least a couple of hundred MBs, and the Recovery HD on Lion is 650 MB (784.2 MB on Mountain Lion).

In short, if you've pulled the lower-right corner all the way to the bottom, you've got all the space you can.

Sorry, there's some sort of problem with images on the forums for the last couple of days -- the image you posted doesn't appear for me. That's happening a lot, seemingly at random.

Can you explain what's in the image?

Thanks Pondini. I resized my HFS+ partition as outlined by the document that was specified for Lion. Now the ML installer is happy with the parition and did allow me to install ML.

This is insane. I bought a Mac so I wouldn't have to do crap like create partitions, so it would just work.

I've run LInux boxes and laptops, so it's not like I can't do it, but it's very odd and strange to find that just to install the next update from Apple you have to jump through stupid hoops like this.

Uncool.