Mountain Lion won't install

[Jeff Troiano]

Ok, I've been trying to upgrade/install Mountain Lion is the last week of December.

To make a long story short.

I decided to upgrade to ML on Christmas Day. Downloaded, clicked to start, it installed some files on my Mac, then restarted itself. The system started boot back up, Apple logo screen came on, little spinning cog thing going round and round. About 2 min in, the Apple logo turns into a circle with a slash through it. And that's it, wond do anything else. If I hard reset, does the same thing. If I reset the PRAM, still doesmthemsame thing.

If I boot into safe mode, or from my USB boot drive. I then had to goto into my main drive, and delete the OS X installer data folder, the upgrade program created.

No matter what I've done, this happens every time I try to install Mountain Lion. I've created ML thumb drive booters, when I boot to that, holding the option key, it will go to the installer, but will recognize only the thumb drive. Not any of my 4 internal drives.

I've reformatted my SSD at least a dozen times the last month. I've tried creating a 2nd admin user account (per Apple support recommendation), that didn't work.

I have a quadro 4000 Mac video card I've tried taking that out and installing the stock card that came with the Mac. Didn't help.

I'm thinking of taking out my SSD, and putting in a spare 1tb drive, just to see if its my SSD drive.

It baffles me that Lion installs with out problems (done it at least 15 times in the last month), but ML won't. No matter what I do.

Any one have any suggestions of things to try?

Thanks for the help.

In case it matters, my system is...

2009 8 core 2.26 ghz Mac Pro
24 gig (6 x 4 gig)
Quadro 4000 Mac
Intensity Pro video capture card
240 gig owc SSD drive (boot drive)
OS X 10.7.5

 

[ConCat]

Did you try booting into recovery by holding down Command+R when rebooting then restoring from a backup?

 

[Jeff Troiano]

Did you try booting into recovery by holding down Command+R when rebooting then restoring from a backup?

Yes, but that only works with Lion. If I reformat my drive, then it erases everything, including the recovery partition. If I install Lion, it creates a recovery partition. If I going into recovery, it gives me the option to download and reinstall the OS X, but it defaults to 10.7.5.

 

[ConCat]

Yes, but that only works with Lion. If I reformat my drive, then it erases everything, including the recovery partition. If I install Lion, it creates a recovery partition. If I going into recovery, it gives me the option to download and reinstall the OS X, but it defaults to 10.7.5.

Didn't you have Lion installed before you tried to install Mountain Lion?

 

[costabunny]

I see you tried removing the video card, have you tried removing it,and all cards and disconnecting all hard disks other than the target you want to put ML on?

Also just a query, but you say you have multiple drives - any of them in software RAID (or do you have a hardware RAID card at all).?

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also can you boot Lion off a different drive and maybe try running the installer from within the OS and choose the SSD as the install target?

I remember doing this for a problematic mbp once in the past, tho it was SL rather than ML.