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OS X Lion Install Failed!

Posted in Apple on the July 21st, 2011

Alligator tried to get his hands on OS X Lion as soon as it was released yesterday but ran into a roadblock while installing OS X Lion on his MBP. After waiting an hour for the download to finish from the app store the installation finally started. After a couple of minutes the computer restarted and Alligator saw a progress bar saying 35 minutes remaining and was really excited to be in OS X Lion heaven soon.
But Alligator was in for a surprise when after a couple of a minutes there was a big yellow exclamation mark saying “Install Failed”. The detailed error message stated

Max OS X can’t be installed on the disk iMac, because a recovery system can’t be created. Visit www.apple.com/support/no-recovery to learn more.


Visiting the URL in the message didn’t reveal much and after a couple of hours tinkering around Alligator believed it had to do something with the Boot Camp partition and Voila! removing the partition fixed the issue. So Alligator would like to share the steps to save someone else a couple of hours.

1.) Launch Boot Camp partition.
2.) Backup data on the partition (including documents, excel, powerpoint files, etc.) (This is important since you will no be able to recover any files in this partition)
3.) Re-boot back into Mac OS X.
4.) Launch Boot Camp Assistant under Utilities.
5.) Remove partition by recovering to a single partition.
6.) Re-start Lion installation by going to Applications and looking for “Install OS X Lion”.
7.) Enjoy MAC OS X Lion.

Hopefully this will resolve the issue. If you found any other solutions that worked without deleted the Boot Camp partition please let us know but posing a comment below.

2 Responses to 'OS X Lion Install Failed!'

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  1. on July 22nd, 2011 at 6:16 am

    Lion download process is driving me crazy. It’s saying “Waiting…” for a couple of hours. Download simply doesn’t start!… Will there be any problem if I shutdown my MacBook now? Can I try again later? If yes, how? Must I run AppStore again?

  2. Bill said,

    on July 22nd, 2011 at 11:01 am

    I was having the same issue and got around it by creating a partition between the windows bootcamp and the primary Mac and it worked.

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