Can't update from 10.7 to 10.8. Could this be because of other partitions?

[jbmoore]

Background:
I have a MacBook Pro with a 2.2 intel i7 with 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
When I click about this Mac, it says late 2011 and I believe I bought it on the apple website on Christmas Day of 2011. Anyways,
I have Mac OS 10.7.5 with latest updates installed, I had rEFIt installed, and Ubuntu LTS. I believe rEFIt and Ubuntu LTS were latest editions. Then I bought Mac OS 10.8 in the App Store. I tried to install OS 10.8 and on reboot, the install didn't work so I rebooted and went back into 10.7 and renamed the efi folders to backup_efi. (This is how I disabled rEFIt). I was assuming that the whole rEFIt and Linux and partitioning the hard drive had something to do with why the install wasn't working.

What happens next:
So I tried to install 10.8 again and on reboot the 10.8 installer gave me this error:
"An error occurred while installing OS X.
You cannot install "OS X" on this disk. OS X cannot start up from this disk"
(side note, this error looks familiar so it may have been the same problem I had installing it before I disabled rEFIt.)
Then there is a place to select the disk where you want to install OS X
I have 2 choices:
1) Mac OS X Install ESD (326.2 MB free / 4.78 GB total)
2 Macintosh HD (371.68 GB free / 529.3 GB total)
Both have the triangle containing the exclamation point on their icons.

When I select Macintosh HD, the message "OS X cannot start up from this disk." appears below the icons.

Now my only choice is to click the go back button and either restart, shutdown. Oh wait I just found that if I click the apple in the top left I can select the start-up disk. Ok (sigh of relief), I'm able to get back into 10.7.

The problem:
I can't figure out how to update to 10.8, and I don't know exactly why it's giving me that error. Please help.

Also the attached photo is appearing upside down in the "preview post" but when I edit attachments and click the image link it shows right side up. I'm not sure what's going on here but hopefully it doesn't end up showing upside down on here.

 

[justperry]

Where is the ESDInstall located, did you restore it to a USB stick or just dragged it there?


Oh, and when you upload a picture better make it smaller, the screenshot is huge, 3.5 MB, not everyone is on unlimited internet.

 

[jbmoore]

Image size / ESIDInstall

Yea, I was posting from my iphone last night because I thought I didn't have a computer and I didn't know how to resize the image or even how big the image would be. I edited the image a min ago, but I still don't know what file size I should be shooting for, I think i made it between 600 and 700 KB, which should be much better than 3.5 MB lol. Sorry about that. What size does everyone suggest?

How do I find out where the ESDInstall is? Its been a while since I put rEFIt and ubuntu on my system and I really don't remember much about how I did it. Although I'm pretty sure I used rEFItBlesser.

my "efi" folder is located on Macontosh HD and in Desktop/rEFIt/
my "rEFIt" folder is located on my desktop
my "rEFItBlesser" folder is located on Desktop/rEFIt/

and a search for ESID in finder yields no relevant result, so then I thought well maybe it will show up under disk utility but I'm not really sure what I'm doing there. I'll post a screenshot of it too.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Can't update from 10.7 to 10.8. Could this be because of other partitions?"

I believe the simple answer is: yes.

My suggestion for upgrading:
1. Back up EVERYTHING to an external drive. (I always recommend CarbonCopyCloner instead of Time Machine)
1a. Use CCC to create a BOOTABLE CLONE of your interal Mac boot partition on the external drive
2. Boot from the external drive.
3. RE-INITIALIZE the internal drive. DO NOT re-partition as of yet.
4. Install the new OS
5. Use Migration Assitant to "migrate over" what you wish to retain from your backup drive.
6. Now it's time to re-partition if necessary.

Aside: I wouldn't trust any Mac I have to anything other than "Mac" partitions. No Windows, no Linux, no nuthin'. But that's just me.

 

[jbmoore]

How do I "re-initialize the internal drive"?