Hello everyone. Friday night I bought Lion, tried to install it, and pretty much immediately ran into problems 
I wish I read the news articles that I have since read about the issues people are having, because I would have done things a lot differently (made an install DVD, back up my media, etc etc), but to be honest I'm a little upset with Apple because at no point during installation did it warn me about serious problems like my hard drive being wiped... obviously there will always be issues for early adopters, bugs, etc, but I think a window should pop up saying "take these precautions" or something when these things are possible, but upon not seeing any such thing, I just assumed Apple had found a great way to streamline the whole process and let users install Lion by using the app store alone.
I followed the thread below:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1191526/
which seemed helpful, but their installing roadblocks aren't quite the same as mine.
OK enough rambling, basically:
1. after installing from 10.6.8 with all the most recent updates,
2. the first thing I remember was some recovery window showing up from either snow leopard or Lion (I think snow leopard) and a grey metal airbrushed background - it's weird, I don't know if I'm on lion or SL because I have the lion inverse page-scrolling thing and a couple other lion features, but my startup disk is called Mac 10.6.8
3. I clicked an option on the recovery window to get internet assistance, because I wasn't sure what was going on, which brought up a page suggesting that I was probably here due to problems with my hard drive
4. I went to disk utilities and tried to fix the permissions about 50 different times, using all kinds of different orders (first verify, then do this, then that, etc), restarting every fifth time or so.
5. My hard drive clearly had issues that weren't getting resolved so I wiped my cell phone's SD card, partitioned it 6 ways in disk utilities, and saved all *essential* things on my hard drive - at this point I was ready to just delete the hard drive and start anew
6. I can not delete my hard drive because the partition Macintosh HD will not be unmounted. If it's helpful, I never changed my mid 2010 13" MBP's 320GB hard drive, physically or otherwise (I never put any boot-camp partition on there or anything, it's all stock)
7. I thought "maybe it can't unmount because of the install disks." in disk utility there are two disks below the grey line where the 320BG hitachi and Mac HD partition sit, "disk 1" with a partition called "Mac OS X Install ESD" and "disk 2" with partition "Mac OS X Base system." I thought maybe it was using/running those disks and would not unmount until they were copied elsewhere
8. back to my cell phone, make two new partitions (the other ones were copied onto my friend's computer), restored "disk one" on the first partition and tried to restore "disk two" on the second but get error "The startup disk can't be used as a resource disk"
So i have no idea what to do, but I DO have an awfully expensive paperweight and lots of frustration.... if anyone can help I would be extremely grateful! Thanks.
I wish I read the news articles that I have since read about the issues people are having, because I would have done things a lot differently (made an install DVD, back up my media, etc etc), but to be honest I'm a little upset with Apple because at no point during installation did it warn me about serious problems like my hard drive being wiped... obviously there will always be issues for early adopters, bugs, etc, but I think a window should pop up saying "take these precautions" or something when these things are possible, but upon not seeing any such thing, I just assumed Apple had found a great way to streamline the whole process and let users install Lion by using the app store alone.I followed the thread below:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1191526/
which seemed helpful, but their installing roadblocks aren't quite the same as mine.
OK enough rambling, basically:
1. after installing from 10.6.8 with all the most recent updates,
2. the first thing I remember was some recovery window showing up from either snow leopard or Lion (I think snow leopard) and a grey metal airbrushed background - it's weird, I don't know if I'm on lion or SL because I have the lion inverse page-scrolling thing and a couple other lion features, but my startup disk is called Mac 10.6.8
3. I clicked an option on the recovery window to get internet assistance, because I wasn't sure what was going on, which brought up a page suggesting that I was probably here due to problems with my hard drive
4. I went to disk utilities and tried to fix the permissions about 50 different times, using all kinds of different orders (first verify, then do this, then that, etc), restarting every fifth time or so.
5. My hard drive clearly had issues that weren't getting resolved so I wiped my cell phone's SD card, partitioned it 6 ways in disk utilities, and saved all *essential* things on my hard drive - at this point I was ready to just delete the hard drive and start anew
6. I can not delete my hard drive because the partition Macintosh HD will not be unmounted. If it's helpful, I never changed my mid 2010 13" MBP's 320GB hard drive, physically or otherwise (I never put any boot-camp partition on there or anything, it's all stock)
7. I thought "maybe it can't unmount because of the install disks." in disk utility there are two disks below the grey line where the 320BG hitachi and Mac HD partition sit, "disk 1" with a partition called "Mac OS X Install ESD" and "disk 2" with partition "Mac OS X Base system." I thought maybe it was using/running those disks and would not unmount until they were copied elsewhere
8. back to my cell phone, make two new partitions (the other ones were copied onto my friend's computer), restored "disk one" on the first partition and tried to restore "disk two" on the second but get error "The startup disk can't be used as a resource disk"
So i have no idea what to do, but I DO have an awfully expensive paperweight and lots of frustration.... if anyone can help I would be extremely grateful! Thanks.