I've been pulling my hairs for hours.. I purchased a new mini today and immediately took out the 500gb it came with and replaced it with a western digital scorpio 750gb. I began by installing a version of lion i had in a bootable usb stick which I made when I upgraded to lion. The way I did this was by putting the new drive in an external HD enclosure and booting from my MBP. Little did I know long and behold when it was done and I put the new drive in the mini to my surprise I get the white screen with the circle with the line through it (similar to the no smoking ones...) doing some research I find out that the versions of lion differ from MPB and mini. I tried to super duper the drive but didn't seem to work. Also, when I put the new 750gb inside the mini and hold option it boots into the recovery screen but then it says cannot install osx please reinstall... I've been going crazy and maybe I need to see things from a different perspective. Any help would be appreciated...
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Help please, New drive can't boot...I'm going craaaazzzyy
- Thread starter blkonblk17
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When you reboot the Mini, you need to hold command-R to activate the Lion Internet Recovery option, not the option key.
You can also put the original 500 GB drive in an external, attached it to the Mini and boot from that (here's where you press the Option key). You can then install something like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper, clone the external to the new internal 750 GB drive, then should be able to boot from it.
I just tried the Command-R method during start up. It took me into the internet recovery. It then appeared to be downloading something. When it finished it went to the Mac OS X Installer screen and immediately popped open an error message reading "There was a problem installing Mac OS X" - Try reinstalling. (Pictures below). I already tried Superduper too to copy the factory drive and finished successfully. However, When I put the 750GB back into the mini and boot it, it boots into the OS fine. However, It then freezes after about 2 minutes after being on the OS. I then tried restarting holding option and there isn't any recovery partition it just shows "Macintosh HD" This is really starting to get annoying! Thanks for the help
I would boot into the recovery mode and use Disk Utility to clone the original drive onto the new WD drive (disk utility will also copy the recovery partition, the others won't)
Thanks, I will try that if what I am doing now doesn't work. I forgot to add that I also upgraded the RAM in the mini as well from the base 2gb to 8gb. Since I've been getting all these error messages and such I came upon something I am not familiar with and if someone has insight please share. It's "Resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM. I did this following the apple tutorial and it seems to have fixed everything. Once I did that I held down Command-R and it was able to access the online servers without a hitch and is currently downloading lion. Once again, if anyone can add as to why it all started coming together after I reset the above it would be great as I am always trying to learn. Thanks guys
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
Are you going into disk utilities and preparing the new hard drive? If that 750 is new then you would need to partition and format it. If you have not done this then that is likely why it is failing it can't install the OS on a raw drive.
I have already done this multiple times and I've never had it fail, but I always run the disk utility and create the partition and format. I even had one drive that was not new, but I still had to go ahead and create a new partition and format before Lion would install.
I have already done this multiple times and I've never had it fail, but I always run the disk utility and create the partition and format. I even had one drive that was not new, but I still had to go ahead and create a new partition and format before Lion would install.
Yup, this wouldn't be the first HD I install on a mac so I'm quite familiar with the formatting portion. What seems to have done the trick is resetting the PRAM and NVRAM for some reason. Not sure why, but after I reset them everything worked fine. Strange but... It works now so
Yup, this wouldn't be the first HD I install on a mac so I'm quite familiar with the formatting portion. What seems to have done the trick is resetting the PRAM and NVRAM for some reason. Not sure why, but after I reset them everything worked fine. Strange but... It works now so
Great, glad you found the solution and got it working!