Can't install Mac OS X on a Journaled partition

[mabaker]

Hello there,

I wonder if some of you were as kind to point me to a possible reason for I can't install neither Tiger nor Leo on a MacOS Journalled partition.

I get a red exclamation mark telling me either to "prepare the partition with the help of the disk utility" or (Tiger installer) "that Tiger can't boot up from there".

This partition is 100 GB. It has been reformatted from NTFS to McOs Journaled beforehand. The whole disk is about 460 GB with the rest containing NTFS files on a separate Windows NTFS partition.

Please do not tell me I would have to reformat my WHOLE HDD with MacOS Journaled and only then the installer lets me install the OS properly.

Thank you very much in advance for all your insights.

 

[Cromulent]

Is this a hackintosh?

 

[mabaker]

Oh, I forgot to specify!

No. not at all a hackintosh. It's a Powermac G5 Dual 1.8!

And I do have Tiger installed on the standard 80 GB that came with it initially but it won't me install anything on the newly added 500 GB HDD even though I did partition it properly.

 

[sickmacdoc]

Another question- when the drive itself in question is selected in Disk Utility (not the individual partition), what does it show at the bottom of the screen where it lists "Partition Map Scheme:"?

For a G5 (or any other PPC based Mac for that matter) it should read APM (for Apple Partition Map) in order to be a bootable disk. If the disk was originally a PC formatted disk (as virtually all new blank disks are) before partitioning, it will probably read MBR (for Master Boot Record) if the "options" button at the bottom of the partition pane in Disk Utility was not changed.

If that is the case, then you have two alternatives that I can see:

• Although you don't want to, reformatting and repartitioning with the correct "APM" selection made in the partitioning options (example of choices in that box shown below)

• Google "installing osx on mbr partition" which will give you some hacks/workarounds mostly based on hackintosh projects where an MBR partitioned disk has to be used. I am not at all up to speed on that whole side of things so can only suggest that search.

Now on the chance that it does NOT read "MBR" then disregard all the above!

 

[Amdahl]

I would add, that although the newest (2005) G5s can boot from GUID (intel) partition drives(but OSX installer won't let you install to it), I don't know if any PPC can boot from MBR. Does anyone know?

 

[mabaker]

sickmacdoc

Dear sickmacdoc!

Thank you so much for your thorough answer. It indeed states that the previously Windows-formatted disk is MBR! Now I understand the problem and know how to go on with the installation.

So tricky to have PC and Mac after all!

 

[darkcurse]

Nope, PPC Macs won't boot from MBR drives.