Snow Leopard Installation Trouble Due to Hard Drive Partition Table

September 7th, 2009

Having a late 2007 macbook, I was looking to upgrade from leopard to snow leopard, however when I went to begin the installation it reported that my hard drive was not properly partitioned and could not be installed.  Others have written that resizing the partition fixed the problem, however that did not work for me.  Below are the steps I took to resolve this problem.

  1. Make sure that your Time Machine backup is up to date.  Choose backup now in time machine.
  2. Put the Snow Leopard DVD into DVD-ROM drive.
  3. Reboot the machine and hold down the ‘c’ key on the keyboard while the computer starts.  This will make your mac boot from the optical drive.
  4. Once the installer has booted choose the disk utility program.
  5. Click on the hard drive leopard is installed on and then click the partition tab.
  6. Delete all hard drive partitions and then create a new partition scheme.
  7. Then choose the ‘options’ button below the partition display and set the partition type to GUID.  My was defaulted to APM and APM will not work with snow leopard.
  8. Once you have configured your partitions and set the partition type click the apply button.
  9. Then open time machine and do a restore.
  10. The computer will reboot once time machine has completed the restore.
  11. Then proceed to upgrade to Snow Leopard as normal.