"this disc cannot be used to startup your computer" mavericks

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Level 1

19 points

"this disc cannot be used to startup your computer" mavericks

I'm running 10.6.8, trying to update to Mavericks. I ran the installer, got an error. (Sorry, I don't remember the specific error.) I used disc utiility to enable journaling. Still had a problem, but installer did get as far as listing recently used power pc apps that will no longer work.

Did some research, and it looked like it might be an issue with partitions. (I had a techtool edrive partition.) I removed that. Ran disc utility to Repair disc. Installer says "this disc cannot be used to startup your computer". Huh. Surprising since the disc is being used to startup my computer, but okay.

Did some more research, restarted, repaired disc again, repaired disc permissions. Still getting the same error. I'm stumped. Any ideas?

iMac (21.5-inch Late 2009), Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Oct 25, 2013 7:43 AM

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Answer 1

Blatay Author

Level 1

19 points

Oct 25, 2013 4:29 PM in response to Blatay

Finally got it to work.

First I did what it says on this page. That got me past the "this disc cannot be used..." thing.

From there I was getting a new error (hey, that's progress, right?) that said: "An error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again." Running the application again yeilded the same error repeatedly.

There was an installation folder that had been created on my harddrive. I trashed that, tried again and it worked.

Best of luck.

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Answer 2

Oct 25, 2013 7:24 PM in response to Blatay

Thanks Blatay, works for me...

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Answer 3

Dec 9, 2013 11:35 AM in response to Blatay

I have this same issue. I have 119 GB available on my hard drive and yet it says that "this disc cannot be used to start up your computer". Weird, considering this disc IS being used to start up my computer with OS X 10.6.8.

I cannot go into disc utility and change the partition because my disc is not currently partitioned and therefore, I don't have that tab as an option to select.

Any ideas on how to fix this issue so I can upgrade my operating system?

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Answer 4

petermac87

Level 5

7,447 points

Dec 9, 2013 11:40 AM in response to thelowedown

You have given no specs on your computer. More info would help.

Cheers

Pete

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Answer 5

Dec 28, 2013 3:56 PM in response to petermac87

Hey I'm having a similar issue. Trying to install Mavericks on an Early 2011 Macbook Pro, currently using version 10.7.5.

I tried the Disk Utility fix to no avail (repartioning the drive to make it smaller), I also checked and made sure that the partition scheme is GUID Partition Table.

Is there anything else that could be causing this problem? Perhaps an interaction from Time Machine or from Bootcamp?

Thanks!

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