Comments on: “You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume.”

By: oh happy day

oh happy day — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 04:08:31 +0000

Bad enough to crash, then not having any “official” help from the smarty-pants people at apple, then having to read endless strings on glitch after hiccup.
Happily I found my final answer tucked into the grateful comments on this post. I too lack the “GUID_partition_scheme” on my G4 17″. In the end I went with Mac OS Journaled format erasing once for good measure and then rebooting.
Glad I am for the trick it did.
gratsi

By: Michael Camp

Michael Camp — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:18:46 +0000

You are a life-saver. Found the “solution” to this issue at Apple.com and after much frustration I was ready to give up. Your solution worked perfectly.

Thanks!!

By: scott plamondon

scott plamondon — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 03:34:26 +0000

you made my night. I was two seconds away from over thinking this problem and quitting trying to fix this mac and all it needed was a reboot. YOU ARE THE MAN MY FRIEND

By: David Walker

David Walker — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 07:09:56 +0000

Thanks for your post. I was worried that my iBook G4 could not use a new 160GB disk I just fitted. Worked fine after a reboot. The old IT helpdesk solution – “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”.

By: R Rajesh

R Rajesh — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:44:53 +0000

A reboot worked for me as well! Thanks!

By: Rob Rushing

Rob Rushing — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:35:38 +0000

Wow—I was about to get really worried, but this was exactly the problem. How annoying. Is there some reason that Apple’s help pages don’t suggest that a restart may be necessary?

By: Bill T

Bill T — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 14:50:49 +0000

Your reboot trick didn’t work when using the original OSX Install cd that came with the G4iMac, but when I used a later OSX (Tiger) Install cd, it worked great. Thanks.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:36:25 +0000

My god, thanks! I spent an hour on this, scratching my head, and about to punch the wall!!

By: Mbcx

Mbcx — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:05:03 +0000

Thanks a lot – my eMac had the same problem with 40GB, but not with 8GB – it looks like setup can’t get full drive’s info when advanced LBA is used.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 20 May 2009 01:35:50 +0000

Oh my..I just spent an hour beating my head against the wall until I found this. It’s so easy

Thanks!