Help with partitioning after erase

[dodge586]

Hi all,

I'm new to Mac though I have a lot of experience with Windows systems, this means I have a tendency to think about things in a Windows kind of a way!

Wanting to know more about Macs and OSX I purchased a used Macbook with Lion.

Part of the learning process I wanted to go through was a clean install of Lion. I have it on bootable DVD and using this method I erased the existing OSX disk and then attempted to run the Lion installer.

However, when the Lion installer asks me to select a disk for installation I have NO options available to me. I assumed that I needed to create a suitable partition using the Disk utility first (various posts also indicated this) but I have no options available to me here.

All the disk utility shows is disk 1> Mac OSX base System which has a fixed partition size of 1.52GB. All options under First Aid, Erase, Partition and Restore are greyed out - in effect I have no options available and there is nothing to adjust.

Where has all my unpartitioned space gone??? Why can't I see it and partition it into something useable? Have I done something wrong?

Any help MUCH appreciated

Thanks

 

[TheAppleSource]

I'm not completely familiar with the idea of erasing a disk, but whenever I've done a clean install before, the first thing I've done is gone into disk utility and partitioned the drive (normally I do it into 2 because I occasionally use a Windows partition). I format the Mac partition as Mac OS Extended, Journaled.

Like I said, I'm not sure if that's the "proper" way to do things, but that is how I normally do it, and it seems to work for me.

 

[dodge586]

the problem is Disk utility can't partition anything - the unallocated space has simply vanished so it would seem!?

 

[TheAppleSource]

the problem is Disk utility can't partition anything - the unallocated space has simply vanished so it would seem!?

What can you see when you go into Disk Utility? In the sidebar to the left, is there any sign of a hard drive? Maybe take a photo?