MacOS – Installing Mavericks instead of Yosemite

From what I've been able to gather, this issue occurred because of the existence of partition 4. A default install of OS X, as of Lion, involves three partitions: EFI, your OS X boot volume, and the recover partition.

Features such as Recovery Mode and FileVault require original partitioning schemes in many cases - especially when FileVault is already in use on a partition, as it the partition scheme has been converted to a CoreStorage group. This makes things much messier to try installing without an original layout.

This seems to be the most likely cause of your error. Since I have no logs, dumps, or other material to go by, I can only speculate and apply my knowledge and experience to the matter. However, seeing as OS X installed just fine to the 4th partition, which was blank, it seems to me that the partition scheme itself was to blame, as I stated above. Sorry about the inconvenience.

Good luck and happy upgrading!

Thank you all for your help. I finally managed to make it work. It seemed the problem is somehow related to USB boot support of MacBook2,1. This is how it worked for me:

use these 5 steps if you're upgrading from 10.5.X to 10.7.X

1. Copy /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist to desktop
2. Open it in an editor (I used TextEdit)
3. Under ProductVersion change 10.5.X to 10.6.X
4. Save and Authenticate
5. copy it back to /System/Library/CoreServices/ overwriting the original SystemVersion.plist

use these 8 steps if you have a problem with USB boot.

1. Using BootCamp Create a 5GB partition
2. Open Disk Utility
3. Select Lion installation file (DMG) and click on Open
4. From main pane Click on Restore Button
5. From left pane Drag and drop ESD (below the DMG) onto Source
6. From left pane Drag and drop the newly create partition onto Destination
7. Click on Restore button below Destination
8. Restart and hold Option key. Now the partition is available in the boot menu.