Installing Mac OS X Lion

I decided to give Mac OS X Lion a try for my 13″ White Macbook.

$29.99 on the Mac App Store. Sold!

The download was quick. No issues here. Now to proceed with the installation… Hold on to your boots, this is going to be a bumpy ride.

Step 1: Back up to Time Machine. I made sure I had everything backed up on my Western Digital passport external drive before proceeding.

Step 2: I decided to try the clean install method by first creating a usb image using the instructions from the Egg Freckles website.

While creating the usb image, I realized that the install.dmg needs more than 4 GB. So, I jaunted towards the closest Best Buy for a 16 GB usb flash drive. Cost $19.99.

Step 3: After creating the usb image, I restarted my mac and formatted my hard drive using Disk Utility from the booted usb drive. Things look good so far.

Step 4: Now that my hard drive is formatted, I clicked on the installation of the Lion OS. A few minutes in, I get the following message on the screen:

“Can’t download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X”

Uh oh! The install seems to be failing during the creation of the recovery partition phase.

Next step: Google! Rien! I decided to restore my Macbook to the original Time Machine backup. That took 4 hours. Then I spent a week browsing the interwebs trying to find out what could be the problem. No viable solution could be found until I stumbled upon the following forum yesterday: Codez4mac.com

According the forum posts, the possible problem could be a bad hard drive or a bad memory module. I recall having problems with my hard drive a few weeks ago and that I had to do a repair disk from disk utility. The problem could be persistent.

I made another jaunt to the closest Best Buy and got a new 250GB notebook hard drive ($49) and a new set of screw driver tools with a T-8 torx head bit ($7.99) for its installation.

With the new tools, I installed the new hard drive on my laptop using the instructions from the Mac Instruct website. Fired up the Lion usb install on this drive and the same message pops up! S**t! It’s not the hard disk. Next up, memory. My Macbook has two 2GB sticks in the two memory bays. So, first I removed one memory module and tried the install again.

Encore! This is not going well.

Second module removed…same s**t!

So, hard disk: check. Memory: check. All that’s left is now to check the usb install image.

I reinserted my old hard drive and placed all the memory modules back into their respective slots. I re-downloaded OS X Lion from the app store (without paying another cent. Yay Apple!) and re-created the disk image.

Now let’s give this one more try on the new hard drive (I wanted to keep the contents of the old drive safe, just in case). After swapping hard drives, I rebooted using the new usb install flash drive. After about 7 minutes of nail-biting…

Success!

The recovery partition was created and the rest of the Mac OS X Lion proceeded without a hitch.

I migrated all my documents and folders using Migration Assistant from the Time Machine backup drive and now I’m back in business. I still need to tweak things and re-install some additional software. The journey was hard and expensive, but the destination is sweet.

Image source: apple.com

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