“You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume.”

111 Replies to ““You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume.””

1. Thanks for your tip. I was in despair when I saw the error message. This is my second attempt at replacing the hard drive. The first hard drive was a Seagate 80 GB that Installer would not recognized. After two disassembly sessions. I took the Seagate out and installed it in a old Toshiba laptop, worked fine. I next tried a WDScorpio 120 GB. Installer recognized the drive and I went through the partition process until I came across this error message and my jaw dropped to the floor. Now I’m so happy to get my iBook up and running.

2. Top notch!!

3. I ordered a used flat pannel G4 imac for a customer and I just about threw the thing across the room. I ran the disk utility a million friggin times with no results. After a reboot as you said, there it goes. A million thank yous, you are my savior.

4. I use PC for overclocking since long time ago, and Microsoft-base networks administrator. I have got a iMac G4 400MHz since yesterday (it belonged to my sister), put 512 MB of memory on it, an old WD 160GB hard drive (but obviously I use only 128, the limit). I got the same problem. I used the same solution. It worked.

   I have no words.

   I miss my old Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K.

5. Sweet! Thank you!

6. Thanks for the (simple) tip! I was starting to panic that I’d have the nightmare task of taking apart my iBook again…

7. Thank you soooooooooooo much!! After all those hours of taking this apart and putting them together, what a relief!!

8. Thank you.

9. you my friend are a life save. just put a 250gig hd in my powerbook 17 and it is installing right now thanks to your blog! i was freakin out thinking that i had installed incorrectly as it is my first attempt at cracking a case open!!! thanks

10. Wow! That was a nice save. Thank you… You may have saved my marriage!

11. Great job leaving this up, saved my night.

12. +1 man…new to mac from linux, was like “What?” then you came along. TY!!

13. Man – thanks a tonne!!!..went thru the same stuff..went tot he mac site – they asked me to partition my disk and all that…decided to give ur solution a try – WHAM !! it showed up with out any problem, after a reboot !

    Thanks again!

14. Good job, thanks for posting this. Having changed the drive in my iBook G4 after the old one made like it was dying, I was scratching my head for a few minutes before I googled up the error message. Who’d have thought that the installer caches partition table info? Bit of an oversight by the Apple techies there…

15. Pingback: Big fat hard drive in a 700 MHz G4 iMac at Blog My Wiki!

16. Thank you! Thank you! Was about to take my G4 700 MHz iMac back to bits again, but thanks to you I discovered that I CAN put a 320GB drive in an old iMac – works a treat…

17. Thanks sooooo much! I have never cr@pped my pants soo much in my life

18. Again, Like every one here — a simple restart did the trick. Although this apple link provided some resourceful information regarding detecting a missing volume.

    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303220

19. THANKS!!!

20. i luv you man!! im glad i bumpoed into this page or else i’ll be havin nightmares with the screws again. so yea. Bless you!

21. Hah! I just dropped a 40GB drive into an old iMac and got this message after doing the low level format (write zeros to the drive) option. Thanks for dropping some common sense on us all. I can’t tell you how many times I tell my users at work “try rebooting first!” and I didn’t think to do it myself. 🙂 You were about the third result in my Google search. Blog on!!

22. … and I had the same issue on a G4, read your entry, thought “that cannot be” since Apple talks about the “GUID_partition_scheme” thing which I cannot use since it’s not available on my setup for any reason…
    .
    .
    .
    And yes, a reboot did the job. Being new to the Mac world, I’m glad to see there also some weird things over here 🙂

    Cheers, Jean

23. Thanks a lot for leaving this page up! I was installing a new disk in an old G4 powerbook and ran into this. I’m a bit embarrassed to not have figured this out on my own, since i probably tell someone to try a reboot at least once a day…

    Instead of rebooting i tried dumb things like:
    – trying to boot off a newer incompatible install disk
    – playing with partitions
    – considered booting into target mode and installing the system from my MBP (which would have been a large failure!)
    – considered reformatting the disk to be lba32 (the 128GB limit)

    Apple’s page on this error is not useful in this case, and all of the other pages on the web discuss the partition change for Intel vs PPC macs.

    Instead, it’s just a bug with the 10.3 installer, which i needed to use since i only have the upgrade version of 10.4.

24. Hey, thank you for the info. Rebooting did not work for me – but Ejecting the disk, unplugging from USB and plugging back in did though!

25. It’s workinggggggg!!!!!!!!!!!

26. You are a mental life saver. I was truly about to quit. I thought I would give it another shot and found this post. Thank you again. I was struggling with the G4 for hours trying to figure out what could be wrong after swapping new hard drives. To believe all it took was a reboot. Geez.

27. Great tip, helped me with an iMac G3, fresh installation of Panther instead of the original 9.2.

    Thanks!

28. Dude! You’re awesome! This article prevented my premature baldness. Thank you!

    My PowerBook G4 is up and running.

29. Oh my..I just spent an hour beating my head against the wall until I found this.

    Thanks!

30. Thanks to you and to google for finding you! You have saved me an hour or so scratching my head…

31. Thank you so much, this just saved me a lot of tears!

32. You rock! I just put a 160 GB WD in my 800 mhz ibook, and your page was a lifesaver.

    Thanks again.

33. You are the man
    i’ve got an original beast of an imac i use daily alongside my PC with a core 2 quad=P
    i wanted wireless so i went to buy a wireless usb dongle and saw it was only compatible with 10.3 or above

    i’ve had this imac apart 3,000 times so i thought one more time is fine to upgrade the hard drive right?

    WRONG

    i added a drive (which didnt work i realised after about 16 more times apart)

    and i get a better drive and put it in and i bring up the panther install and am greeted by this lovely message…..

    gladly apple made these things tough so the fall out of the 2nd story window ended with only some minor scratches.

    if it werent for this artice i would have dumped this imac in a lake

    KEEP THIS PAG ALIVE!!!!!

    major kudos!!!!!

34. you are the man!! WTF do apple have to make finding this kind of information so difficult?

35. Friend,
    thanks so much for taking the time to make this simple post. i was so discouraged and i said to myself.. can it be that easy??? and it was!
    thank you!!!
    Michael

36. Oh my..I just spent an hour beating my head against the wall until I found this. It’s so easy

    Thanks!

37. Thanks a lot – my eMac had the same problem with 40GB, but not with 8GB – it looks like setup can’t get full drive’s info when advanced LBA is used.

38. My god, thanks! I spent an hour on this, scratching my head, and about to punch the wall!!

39. Your reboot trick didn’t work when using the original OSX Install cd that came with the G4iMac, but when I used a later OSX (Tiger) Install cd, it worked great. Thanks.

40. Wow—I was about to get really worried, but this was exactly the problem. How annoying. Is there some reason that Apple’s help pages don’t suggest that a restart may be necessary?

41. A reboot worked for me as well! Thanks!

42. Thanks for your post. I was worried that my iBook G4 could not use a new 160GB disk I just fitted. Worked fine after a reboot. The old IT helpdesk solution – “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”.

43. you made my night. I was two seconds away from over thinking this problem and quitting trying to fix this mac and all it needed was a reboot. YOU ARE THE MAN MY FRIEND

44. You are a life-saver. Found the “solution” to this issue at Apple.com and after much frustration I was ready to give up. Your solution worked perfectly.

    Thanks!!

45. Bad enough to crash, then not having any “official” help from the smarty-pants people at apple, then having to read endless strings on glitch after hiccup.
    Happily I found my final answer tucked into the grateful comments on this post. I too lack the “GUID_partition_scheme” on my G4 17″. In the end I went with Mac OS Journaled format erasing once for good measure and then rebooting.
    Glad I am for the trick it did.
    gratsi

46. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
    I normally laugh when it is said in the serie ‘IT Crowd’, but now I feel stupid for searching more complex solution. 🙂

    Thanks!

47. Excellent tip! Just installed a new Hitachi 160GB drive in my old iBook G4 and got this error. Reboot did the trick…once I had formatted the drive.

48. Wow. Thanks! Worked for me. Read instructions for Intel based Macs to partition the drive before seeing your instructions. Nice one.

49. FIVE YEARS since the original post on this fix and you’re STILL helping people. I was about ready to curse the Gods of Technology before I came across your article. Reboot? Really? That simple? Why doesn’t Disk Utility just tell you “Now you must Restart Your Computer”? So dumb.

    Thanks a Million!

50. Me too
    Replaced a disk on an emac – nontrivial
    Same error
    Sick feeling
    Reboot. Bingo
    Thank you!!!

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