Mac OS X 10.5.x Special Report: Installation of Leopard does not complete

Several users have problems installing Leopard. Note that some of these issues may be caused by separately noted instances of faulty media.

Chris Sanders writes:

"I was in the process of installing Leopard on a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz. During the installation process, an error message appeared stating that an error occurred with the installation and it could not be completed. It suggested that I call the manufacturer and restart my computer and try to install the software again. Upon restarting, the Leopard install screen appeared. Going through the steps and arriving at the screen to select which disk to install the operating system on, it was blank. There were no options available. Knowing there was a problem, I started Disk Utility from the install DVD. The Hard Drive mounted but the volume was no where to be found. Luckily, I made a backup before the installation and decided to reformat the drive and start over. Trying to erase the drive, an error message appeared stating "the operation could not be completed. The resource is in use." I attempted this twice to no avail. I decided to go and partition the drive. As expected, there was no partition on the disk and when I attempted to create a partition, I received the same error message. However, the partition did create.

"After creating the partition, I erased the drive just to be safe and began the installation process again. At this point, everything with the installation seems to be operating as expected."

In other cases, the problem may be related to not having enough RAM.

Andrew Tindell writes:

"I ran into a problem when loading Leopard on my second MacBook. The first a Mac Book with2Gb of memory worked fine. However when I started working on the second a MacBook with 512Mb of memory the installer failed to find any hard disk on the machine. The disk utility within the loader showed the drive but the disk did not appear to be mounted. Exiting from the installer was not easy. In the end I changed the start up disk to network as the harddisk did not appear and then pressed eject when rebooting. The disk came out and the machine rebooted into Tiger normally. In the end after a another attempt with the same results I upgraded the machine to 1GB and tried again. It worked perfectly. This appears to be a bug in the installer."

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