Troubles trying to reinstall Mac OS X

[MacsRgr8]

Anyone else having troubles reinstalling Mac OS X (and wiping WinXP)?

I have a Mac mini Core Duo w/ 1 GB RAM, and have installed WinXP SP2 on it. I was very curious and just had to give it a go. This Mac is hooked up to an LCD TV (26", 1280 x 768 rez. @ 60 Hz), and just for laughs I wanted to see the XP desktop on it.
Well, it all succeded very nicely. I used it for a couple of hours, mostly testing all the drivers that are starting to come out.
After a while, I wanted to repartiton the drive (giving 50% of the diskspace to Windows was too generous IMHO), so I wanted to start all over.

Inserted the Mac OS X Install DVD, booted off it, and repartitoned the HD.
Once I've done that I wanted to install Mac OS X on the just created HFS+ volume, but the installer showed the red exclamation mark (on both partitons) that "Mac OS X could not be installed on this volume".

I had seen this before, and usually after a reboot, and re-partiton it will work.

Not this time!

I have rebooted about 10 times.....
Have resetted the NVRAM (as described here).
Also turned the Mac off for 1.5 hours..... nothing!
I keep getting that red exclamation mark....

I just wondered if anyone else had similar problems.

 

[treblah]

Try this.

In Disk Utility click on the actual drive not a partition and Erase -> Erase Free space. Then create a new HFS and Fat32 partition.

 

[MacsRgr8]

Tnx for your reply.

Good idea! So here I go:

I just erased the disk (as you described), and am now erasing the free space.
This will take a while.... (fingers crossed)

 

[mrplow]

you're wasting your time, i had the same problem

click on the drive NOT ANY PARTITION and create 1 big partition as mac.. then, still under the drive and not that partition, goto erase adn erase it as mac format... at this point you should be able to install OS X on it again.. feel free to go back, make 2 partitions (MSDOS must be the first partition) and go again-- it should let you install osx

 

[MacsRgr8]

Tnx for your input guys!

It's working again.

As I did first erase the drive (not partition) before erasing the free space, I assume what mrplow suggested would have been enough.

But hey, at least my drive is really cleanly wiped of all Windoze filth!

Tnx again!

 

[shuffle]

I had a similar issue, and what it boiled down to is a computer that uses EFI instead of BIOS requires a GUID partitioning scheme on the disk, and somehow in all of the Windows XP installation messing around we have all done, the disk got FDISK partitioned. You can look and see what paritioning scheme is used by Getting Info on the disk. I just zeroized the first part of the disk and then re-partitioned, all was good.