Can't install SL, it won't find my harddrives.

[commentarycrew]

Sorry, I've searched for answers, but can't find any. When I go to install Snow Leopard, the only disc it finds is my external, which I use Time Machine for. It won't find either of my internal ones. Plus, it gives me a yellow exclamation point sign on my external anyways.

I have a Mac Pro, 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
I have 4 internal HDs, but I made it into 2, by striping them. I have never had any problem with any installation.
Thank you so much for any help.

 

[dnguyen]

Check your disk utilitiy

Is your partition setting set to GUID mode? If it's not you'll have to repartition your disk.

 

[commentarycrew]

I don't know how to check that. I don't see that in my Disc Utilities.
But repartitioning involves erasing the hard drive doesn't it?

 

[jmpage2]

You don't have to re partition anything to check the partitioning of the volume.

Go into disk utility and click your 'Macintosh HD' (or similar) partition. Make sure that 'show details' is checked.

Now look at the bottom of the disk utility window. You will see the partition details. Your Mac HD partition (boot partition) needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended. If it is not then that's a problem.

Another way for you to fix this is just make a Time Machine backup of your system, install Snow Leopard from scratch (hold down the C key while the Snow Leopard DVD is in the drive at boot up) and then do a time machine restore of your user settings, applications, etc, after Snow Leopard is installed onto the system hard disk.

 

[sidewinder]

Did you boot from the SL DVD?

I first tried to do the upgrade without booting from the DVD and it did not see my boot drive (RAID 1). I booted from the DVD and had no problems after that.

S-

Another way for you to fix this is just make a Time Machine backup of your system, install Snow Leopard from scratch (hold down the C key while the Snow Leopard DVD is in the drive at boot up) and then do a time machine restore of your user settings, applications, etc, after Snow Leopard is installed onto the system hard disk.

Unless you do something before the install, you don't need to restore anything since the default behavior is an "archive and install" which deletes no user content.

S-

 

[jofallon]

Raid issues

I had an internal software raid volume which was not recognized by SL. I installed it on an internal bootable cloned drive and rebooted. Woke the machine up this morning, saw an error message from Time Machine about not enough space for a backup. Then Finder hung. I shut down, and on the reboot, I got "error loading kernel Mach kernel" and a hang. I have 2 WD WD6400AAKS that were in the array.

I booted off an external FW drive and demoted one of the raid slices breaking the array. Perhaps tonight I'll try an SL install on the ex-sliced drive, so to speak. Seems to have some issues with RAID...

 

[commentarycrew]

Thanks for all the replies. I think I have to repartition my hard drives. So discouraging.