MacOS – Installing Lion from custom DIY DVD or USB fails

dvdinstallmacosusb

After upgrading to Lion my computer is really slow. Chrome-takes-a-minute-to-open-a-tab slow. I decided to do a clean Lion install and copy all my stuff to see if that fixes it, so I got a new hard drive for this.

I burned the Lion image to a DVD and also a USB memory. The first time I tried installing, everything seemed to go well until rebooting. I got a kind of forbidden sign and a spinning wheel (with the gray boot background).

I booted from the DVD again and it said "Install failed, try again." but the installer wasn't run again. I found it on / by using the console and run it manually. Both from the DVD and the USB I did several installs, making sure the Internet connection was working before starting and in all cases it finishes, reboots and it looks like the partition in the hard drive is not bootable. It won't boot from hard drive.

Any ideas what's going on and/or how to solve and perform this clean install?

Thank you.

Best Answer

It's hard to know where the failure lies, but you might be able to get around the issue by re-installing Snow Leopard from media and then running the installer you have saved on the DVD/USB. This will avoid having to try the "official" Lion install and see if your installer is the cause or the mac has issues of it's own.