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URGENT disaster.. new SSD-lion wont install & I have like 20 partitions i cant delete

ZestyOne

ZestyOne

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 18, 2009
113
68
Paradise
Basically I bought a OWC SSD hard drive (Pro 6G model), 240GB.

I also just bought a brand new MBP 17", quadcore i7, mid-2011 model. It works perfect out of the box.

I bought crucial 8gb memory, installed it.. rebooted on my factory HDD and it booted fine so i cant imagine memory is the problem. i shut it off, put the SSD in.

Booted up to a USB Key version of lion that I set up from the App Store. I hit Select backup from time machine... halfway through it just reboots. I was like WTF ... so i tried again thinking it may be a fluke. Same thing happened it got halfway through and just hard reboots.

I then thought maybe there was a problem with time machine backup, so I planned on using migration assistant. I rebooted to the key drive and selected Reinstall fresh copy of lion. It says it's copying files over.. takes about 8 minutes, reboots... then on the screen where it says "Installing" nothing else shows up except the bar with the blue lines moving to the right. It just hangs there, i let it sit for 20 mins. I hard rebooted... suddenly i get a very buggy version that appears to work, it completed the lion setup but my graphics were all messed up when I turned it on.

I restarted... hung at a blank white screen for 3 minutes then boots again. During this whole process where it shows the apple logo it's blinking a circle with a line through it.. researched that and it shows the files are major corrupt.

I was at my desktop ONE time, then rebooted and its fubar again.

I restarted, wiped drive clean again with diskutility on my key drive.... same thing happens when i try to install, it hangs on the 'installing screen'

Just for yucks i used diskutil from command line to see if i could delete the recovery partioion. i thought maybe it was half-corrupted or something. I wanted to delete EVERYTHING from the SSD... volumes.. partitions.. everything..

Attached is a list of what i saw when i ran 'diskutil list'

I have no idea what all these are. i tried googling to delete these ****ing things and i have no idea how. i tried all kinds of eraseVolume and eraseDisk and it didnt erase them it just like makes them blank or something.

Can someone tell me the commands to just delete EVERYTHING from the drive so i can try again? including the lion partition and all the other ****

http://i.imgur.com/urGjY.jpg

I was told by OWC its probably an issue with shielding and i have to buy some shielding protector. mentioned in a blog post here. apparently 17" is the only one with issues... go figure

http://blog.macsales.com/9754-owc-offers-fix-for-2011-17-mbp-sata-problems
 
Your new 240GB disk only has 2 partitions (EFI & Apple HFS). The other things are separate drives and/or "something else".

Clean Install with the discs that came with your Mac, then post back.
 
Last edited:
Quad5Ny said:
Your new 240GB disk only has 2 partitions (EFI & Apple HFS). The other things are separate drives and/or "something else".

Clean Install with the discs that came with your Mac, then post back.
Click to expand...

Where are you getting this information. Have you looked at his drive in Disk Utility? It's possible all of the forcing shut downs in the middle of the installation process caused the Lion installer to try and create multiple recovery partitions. In fact, I'd say it's damn likely.
 
DarkestRitual said:
Where are you getting this information. Have you looked at his drive in Disk Utility? It's possible all of the forcing shut downs in the middle of the installation process caused the Lion installer to try and create multiple recovery partitions. In fact, I'd say it's damn likely.
Click to expand...

Thats what i was thinking... i just need to know the command to delete them. googling didnt help at all, i tried for like 2 hours
 
Quad5Ny said:
Your new 240GB disk only has 2 partitions (EFI & Apple HFS). The other things are separate drives and/or "something else".

Clean Install with the discs that came with your Mac, then post back.
Click to expand...

Discs that came with the Mac? Mac's done come with discs anymore.
 
I suggest you get one of those SATA to USB cables (under $10). Connect your old HDD and boot to it. See if you can boot just fine and take a look at disk utility once you have booted up from your original disk. See what it says about your internal hdd. I haven't tried carbon copy cloner with Lion. When I was putting SSD in my Macs, I used ccc to make a clone of the drive and then simply swapped them. No install involved.

I just ran CCC and it offered to clone my Lion Macintosh HD. It couldn't see the recovery partition. I would imagine I could have gone through with it and simply done without the recovery partition as I also have the USB key that I made from the InstallESD.dmg inside Install Mac OS X Lion.app.

From your screen shot, it appears you have a lot of tiny physical disks. If you had a lot of partitions, they really should all show up under /dev/disk0. Perhaps they are all "ram disks".

Here is what diskutil says about the healthy Lion situation on my Macbook:

Code: 
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS LaCie                   1.0 TB     disk1s3
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Dad Old Macintosh HD    159.7 GB   disk2s2

Note that /dev/disk1 is my external drive and /dev/disk2 is the 5400 RPM drive I recently replaced, connected to my Macbook with a USB to SATA cable for purposes of illustration. Of course disk2 is SL so there is no recovery partition. Notice that I renamed Macintosh HD on my old drive so I would (hopefully) never get it mixed up with my real Macintosh HD.

I should also mention that I had trouble with the installESD that I downloaded with Lion. I copied it to another drive and it somehow got corrupted and wouldn't install. I had to download Lion again on another of our Macs and this time I copied InstallESD to a usb drive before doing another thing. You have a good case for calling AppleCare and having them send you a USB so you can upgrade your HDD properly.

How about this? Connect your old HDD using an SATA to USB cable, boot to it but pick the recovery partition. Carefully select the OTHER HDD for restore. BTW, don't restore from Time Machine. I'm willing to bet the TM backup got corrupted. When I upgraded my HDD, I made a "fresh" TM backup and migrated (not restored) from that.
 
Last edited:
DarkestRitual said:
Where are you getting this information. Have you looked at his drive in Disk Utility?
Click to expand...
Yes, yes I have. He included a picture of diskutil in Terminal. (lol, I looked again, disk 14 has a partition called "****YOU")

Blue Sun said:
Discs that came with the Mac? Mac's done come with discs anymore.
Click to expand...
I must have unconsciously skipped over what year his MacBook was while reading.

-------

ZestyOne said:
Thats what i was thinking... i just need to know the command to delete them. googling didnt help at all, i tried for like 2 hours
Click to expand...

To erase a entire disk quickly all you have to do is:
  1. Open Disk Utility
  2. Change the partition map to MBR
  3. Apply
  4. Change partition map back to GUID
  5. Apply

-------

The reason why I suggested the Restore Disks is because sometimes Apple included drivers on system specific OS X media that's not on Retail discs (or in this case the App Store DMG).

Either do one of he things that r0k suggested or visit a Apple Store and see if they can load a Lion image to your new drive.
 
Last edited:
These SATA III SSDs are known to have problems with the 17" MBP. Suggest you send it back and get a SATA II drive that at least will work.
 
Weaselboy said:
These SATA III SSDs are known to have problems with the 17" MBP. Suggest you send it back and get a SATA II drive that at least will work.
Click to expand...

Indeed. I spend quite a few hours trying to get a couple of different Sata III SSDs to work and many of the same issues as the OP. I finally settled on a Vertex 3 which gives me the SATA III speeds and has been rock solid.
 
phpmaven said:
Indeed. I spend quite a few hours trying to get a couple of different Sata III SSDs to work and many of the same issues as the OP. I finally settled on a Vertex 3 which gives me the SATA III speeds and has been rock solid.
Click to expand...

If the shielding kit I got didn't work, I will probably have to do that.

----------
r0k said:
I suggest you get one of those SATA to USB cables (under $10). Connect your old HDD and boot to it. See if you can boot just fine and take a look at disk utility once you have booted up from your original disk. See what it says about your internal hdd. I haven't tried carbon copy cloner with Lion. When I was putting SSD in my Macs, I used ccc to make a clone of the drive and then simply swapped them. No install involved.

I just ran CCC and it offered to clone my Lion Macintosh HD. It couldn't see the recovery partition. I would imagine I could have gone through with it and simply done without the recovery partition as I also have the USB key that I made from the InstallESD.dmg inside Install Mac OS X Lion.app.

From your screen shot, it appears you have a lot of tiny physical disks. If you had a lot of partitions, they really should all show up under /dev/disk0. Perhaps they are all "ram disks".

Here is what diskutil says about the healthy Lion situation on my Macbook:

Code: 
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS LaCie                   1.0 TB     disk1s3
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Dad Old Macintosh HD    159.7 GB   disk2s2

Note that /dev/disk1 is my external drive and /dev/disk2 is the 5400 RPM drive I recently replaced, connected to my Macbook with a USB to SATA cable for purposes of illustration. Of course disk2 is SL so there is no recovery partition. Notice that I renamed Macintosh HD on my old drive so I would (hopefully) never get it mixed up with my real Macintosh HD.

I should also mention that I had trouble with the installESD that I downloaded with Lion. I copied it to another drive and it somehow got corrupted and wouldn't install. I had to download Lion again on another of our Macs and this time I copied InstallESD to a usb drive before doing another thing. You have a good case for calling AppleCare and having them send you a USB so you can upgrade your HDD properly.

How about this? Connect your old HDD using an SATA to USB cable, boot to it but pick the recovery partition. Carefully select the OTHER HDD for restore. BTW, don't restore from Time Machine. I'm willing to bet the TM backup got corrupted. When I upgraded my HDD, I made a "fresh" TM backup and migrated (not restored) from that.
Click to expand...

incredible. I'm going to go buy that right now... I hope they have them at best buy

----------
Weaselboy said:
These SATA III SSDs are known to have problems with the 17" MBP. Suggest you send it back and get a SATA II drive that at least will work.
Click to expand...

How much lower performance is that? :/

I was kinda hoping to go all out, and I'm hesitant not to go with OWC because of the extended tests I've seen done where they compare all the drives and every one except OWC starts to perform horribly after extensive write/rewrite
 
phpmaven said:
Indeed. I spend quite a few hours trying to get a couple of different Sata III SSDs to work and many of the same issues as the OP. I finally settled on a Vertex 3 which gives me the SATA III speeds and has been rock solid.
Click to expand...

Vertex 3 is still a SATA III SSD and may have the same compatibility issues with a 17" MBP.

ZestyOne said:
How much lower performance is that? :/

I was kinda hoping to go all out, and I'm hesitant not to go with OWC because of the extended tests I've seen done where they compare all the drives and every one except OWC starts to perform horribly after extensive write/rewrite
Click to expand...

It depends on the kind of work you are doing. If you are moving large video files around the drive for example, you can see as much as 50% better speed with SATA III over SATA II. If you are just using the machine for web browsing, email, some document creation and editing, you will likely notice no difference at all between the two.

Even a moderately fast SATA II SSD is going to be so much faster than the HDD you have now that you will be impressed with the difference from HDD.

I would save the money an go with a SATA II SSD for best compatibility.

I opted for a Samsung 470 SSD, but there are other good models also.
 
Weaselboy said:
Vertex 3 is still a SATA III SSD and may have the same compatibility issues with a 17" MBP.



It depends on the kind of work you are doing. If you are moving large video files around the drive for example, you can see as much as 50% better speed with SATA III over SATA II. If you are just using the machine for web browsing, email, some document creation and editing, you will likely notice no difference at all between the two.

Even a moderately fast SATA II SSD is going to be so much faster than the HDD you have now that you will be impressed with the difference from HDD.

I would save the money an go with a SATA II SSD for best compatibility.

I opted for a Samsung 470 SSD, but there are other good models also.
Click to expand...

I'm a web designer so I have Photoshop, itunes, mail, chrome, safari, ftp program, textmate, skype, wunderlist always running and I rape photoshop for all it's worth resources wise. I don't really care about moving large files though, thats something I don't do that often, and even on an HDD it wasnt something I'm like oh **** i have to wait.. I'd just go do something else.

What makes the SATA-II any different from an SATA-III that would cause problems with the cable? like what would make it any different at a hardware level.. it seems the cord would just be a little bit thicker and/or have more wires in the cable?
 
ZestyOne said:
I'm a web designer so I have Photoshop, itunes, mail, chrome, safari, ftp program, textmate, skype, wunderlist always running and I rape photoshop for all it's worth resources wise. I don't really care about moving large files though, thats something I don't do that often, and even on an HDD it wasnt something I'm like oh **** i have to wait.. I'd just go do something else.

What makes the SATA-II any different from an SATA-III that would cause problems with the cable? like what would make it any different at a hardware level.. it seems the cord would just be a little bit thicker and/or have more wires in the cable?
Click to expand...

I got my SATA to USB cables from Microcenter. Best Buy probably wants to sell you an enclosure for $39 but a cable will do if you can find one. Correction. I found one on bestbuy.com for $29.99 available online and in store. Careful! Don't get the Seagate one for $19.99. That's to go from esata to a proprietary seagate interface.

All of my SSDs are SATA 2. I have two Vertex 2's and one MicroCenter store brand in our Mac minis. There was no point (as far as I could guess) in getting SATA 3 for an older Mac mini. I have a Seagate Momentus XT in my Macbook. It's not as fast as SSD but it's a lot faster than the 5400 RPM drive that came with my Macbook. The problem with SATA 2 is it is getting harder to find them in stock. You can get them mail order but if you are shopping in a store, they are out of stock and superseded by SATA 3 SSD drives.

To nuke the recovery partition by switching to MBR and back again, you will probably need to create a FAT partition and hit apply. Then revert to 1 partition GUID and the recovery partition should be gone.

If you're looking for a low cost compromise, I can vouch for the 500 GB 7200 RPM/4GB SSD Seagate Momentus XT. I like the way it works in my Macbook and I'll probably keep using it until 256 GB SSD drive prices come down under $200.
 
Anyway while trying to get Lion to install on a VM, I watched the installer load up in verbose mode. I'm 99% sure all those disks in your picture are just RAM drives.

If you have a brand new MacBook Pro it should have the Internet Recovery feature, hold Command+R and see if you can boot into that. I'm suggesting this because it's possible there is something wrong with the USB reinstall media you made.

If you can't do the Internet Recovery then go on with cloning your old HD. And if even that does not work I think you should visit a Apple Store and/or get OWC to swap your drive (you shouldn't have to shield the SATA cable).

Lion Internet Recovery

If you happen to encounter a situation in which you cannot start from the Recovery HD, such as your hard drive stopped responding or you installed a new hard drive without Mac OS X installed,*new Mac models introduced after public availability of OS X Lion automatically use the Lion Internet Recovery feature if the Recovery HD*(Command-R method above) doesn't work. Lion Internet Recovery lets you start your Mac directly from Apple's Servers. The system runs a quick test of your memory and hard drive to ensure there are no hardware issues.

Source: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Quad5Ny said:
Anyway while trying to get Lion to install on a VM, I watched the installer load up in verbose mode. I'm 99% sure all those disks in your picture are just RAM drives.

If you have a brand new MacBook Pro it should have the Internet Recovery feature, hold Command+R and see if you can boot into that. I'm suggesting this because it's possible there is something wrong with the USB reinstall media you made.

If you can't do the Internet Recovery then go on with cloning your old HD. And if even that does not work I think you should visit a Apple Store and/or get OWC to swap your drive (you shouldn't have to shield the SATA cable).
Click to expand...

wow itneresting.. so even if its a brand new HD i can still do command+r?
 
ZestyOne said:
I'm a web designer so I have Photoshop, itunes, mail, chrome, safari, ftp program, textmate, skype, wunderlist always running and I rape photoshop for all it's worth resources wise. I don't really care about moving large files though, thats something I don't do that often, and even on an HDD it wasnt something I'm like oh **** i have to wait.. I'd just go do something else.

What makes the SATA-II any different from an SATA-III that would cause problems with the cable? like what would make it any different at a hardware level.. it seems the cord would just be a little bit thicker and/or have more wires in the cable?
Click to expand...

From your usage pattern it does not sound like you would be constrained by a SATA II drive. That may your best option.

I honestly do not know why SATA II drives work and SATA III drives do not work in these machines. I suspect it has to do with the higher data speeds of the SATA III drives making the data transfer over the cable more susceptible to electronic interference inside the machine.

As I said, if you want the best compatibility, particularly in a 17", get a SATA II drive and be done with it.
 
ZestyOne said:
... :(

It shipped with lion. i guess what I'm asking is does this still work with a completely new HD, or is this something related to the partitions on the HDD that comes with it?
Click to expand...

If I'm reading the Knowledge Base article correctly then Yes, Internet Recovery should work with a completely blank (or new) HD.
 
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