There Was a Problem Installing Mac OS X (Lion) 17 Comments
I had a couple of MacBook Pro laptops grace my desk and I have been upgrading them to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). The first one (maybe eighteen months old) went through without a hitch but the second one (which is a few years old) had all manner of problems including reading my original DVD-RW that I had burnt using the DMG file from the Mac App Store. Another significant problem I encountered was after the initial installation, I kept encountering the error…
“There was a problem installing Mac OS X”.
Quite non-descript and quite unhelpful and even a format and subsequent reinstall didn’t fix the problem.
What I discovered was that the setup for Lion seems to store data in the PRAM (Parameter Random Access Memory) and if this data is corrupted or becomes stale it becomes necessary to reset it in order to undertake a successful installation.
So how is it done?
- Turn off the computer,
- Hold down “Command”, “Option”, “P” and “R” on the keyboard,
- Turn on the computer,
- Keep holding down the keys until the computer restarts itself again (maybe ten or fifteen seconds at most),
- Release the keys after the computer has restarted again.
From here you should be able to proceed with the installation of Lion with no further problems.
August 23, 2011 at 19:03
September 2, 2011 at 02:00Pino
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Thank you – this helped me
September 4, 2011 at 16:31fotomate
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finally it works. i couldn’t get through this error, bit now it works fine on my old MacBook Pro. thanks
September 4, 2011 at 17:40Boydo
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Glad to hear! It’s certainly one of the more obscure and frustrating problems encountered with an OS installation.
September 7, 2011 at 01:34changyoung
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Oh my god! thank you!
September 11, 2011 at 13:01Charly
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Thx for the tip !
September 20, 2011 at 13:13Jo
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OMG! You are a life saver. Thank you.
September 20, 2011 at 13:48Boydo
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No worries
September 21, 2011 at 04:17Elliot F
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The user had re-formatted his HD and couldn’t recover. Nothing else worked. 2 days. The recovery partition, Firewire target disk mode, DVD installer. After clearing the PRAM, installation is going now from a clean install DVD image.
December 7, 2011 at 00:14Michael H
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You ROCK! Didn’t know we had a “P” ram still. Thank you Soooooooo much
December 7, 2011 at 00:38Boydo
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My pleasure!
December 20, 2011 at 07:24Martin
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Thank you so much.
Genius!
December 20, 2011 at 10:02Boydo
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Glad to help
January 3, 2012 at 00:18Chao
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Great tip, thanks.
February 12, 2012 at 02:28gandalf
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saved me, thank you very much!!!!
February 18, 2012 at 18:29Dave Kemsley
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There’s one more step to do this for those who have the firmware password turned on: turn it off.
You can’t reset PRAM/NVRAM if the firmware is password protected.
Today at 13:04Isra V
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Thanks for your help…Regards.