Installing OS X 10.3 tonight and ran into this problem. I was installing to a 30Gb disk that used to have a copy of slackware on it so when I ran the installer I had to run the disk utility and erase the old disk. Once I resumed the install I received the error message:
“You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume.”
After scratching my head for several minutes and re-trying the disk utility a couple times I decided that maybe it simply needed a reboot. Sure enough a reboot using the 10.3 install CD’s cured the problem. I hate non-descript errors, if a piece of software is not going to perform a function due to a problem it should tell you WHY. Anyway, easy enough fix.
EDIT Oct 26 2008: I experienced this issue again tonight while configuring a software raid on a G4 Tiger machine. After the raid was initialized I simply rebooted the machine and entered setup again, the installer allowed me to install on the raid partition after that.
Thank you so much for this post! You are a life saver!
A million accolades for your help!! Replaced bad 100gb HD in Powerbook G4 with used one. Successful boot from install DVD till I got the deadly message post-partition. I almost gave up till I found this page. A roar from the crowd (of 1) when the reboot worked. Thankyouthankyou Sysop.ca poster!
Hey Thanks a lot for the write up. Who knew a simple restart would fix everything.. your brilliant!~!
Thank you so much. I was getting really worried. rebooting worked for my iBook G4.
I savor, lead to I found exactly what I was looking for. You’ve ended my four day long hunt! God Bless you man. Have a nice day. Bye
Just installed a 40gb hard drive in my iBook G3, and got this message. Thought I was going to have to spend ages taking it out again – till I read this message. Thank you! It works. Hooray.
Thanks, that was helpful 😉
GENIUS – THANKYOU
well im stuck with the same problem ..my drive was no raid formated will that be the problem? i just did the tipical extended journal setup.restarted my emac te times and the.same message came up.and the drive shows an ! …any suggestions?
After 2 days of troubleshooting an old Imac flatscreen from 2002 that has not booted in 5 years… After replacing the DVD player and the Hard Drive from a scrapped PC laying in a garbage pile out in my garage. I got this massage and about kicked it across the room… I spent another three hour screwing with it till I googled the error message and found this about halfway down… It seemed too easy… And yet it was the only thing I hadn’t tried… YES IT WORKED… Thank you for posting this man…
Thanks so much for this post. I was going nuts trying to figure it out when I ran into this answer. : )