[Officer M107]

My dad has tried today to install Mountain Lion, upon the first few seconds he's getting this...

We have been to the link suggested but it then takes you to a page about Lion and a different message that pops up.
Any ideas on the problem ?
Permission have been completed and Disk Checks completed.
Installer deleted and re downloaded

[s0hail]

try to burn it to a disk and boot from it.. or a usb

How To Burn Mountain Lion To A DVD Or USB Flash Drive | Lifehacker Australia

[Officer M107]

just trying it now

[s0hail]

not sure but it may also be worth wiping all the Hard Drive too and start fresh

[Officer M107]

seems to hang at the beginning of the installation. Just says installing with the status bar moving but the USB stops flashing and nothing happened for 10 mins.
He has a phone call appointment with the apple care team on tuesday & i'm guessing they are gonna say Genius Bar or a Fresh Install.

[s0hail]

yeah will have to totally wipe the HDD and start fresh could also have a fault somwhere

[anorax25]

Try restarting the iMac in 'safe mode' ( cmd + s + power on) and repeat the installation of ML.

Couldn't get ML to install on my new iMac via the usual methods but the above worked for me.

Good luck.

Col.

[fat jez]

Boot into recovery mode (assuming you have Lion installed, if not boot from the OSX Install disk) and run the disk utility. Tell it to repair the disk.

However, I'd be inclined to make sure I had a good backup of my disk and wipe all the partitions from it and start again.

[Officer M107]

Managed to sort the problem with a fresh install BUT..................................
Think we may have solved the solution while doing a fresh install.

Applecare went through some checks like checking Disk & Permissions (told them we had already checked them.
Then after a few calls to a higher level person then her she asked us if we could to install Mountain Lion on a new external HDD (good luck we had one).
Install Mountain Lion on to that then re download Mountain lion and install but this time install to the original Macintosh HD.

That didn't work either after 4 hours of doing that.

Applecare had scheduled another call the next day at the same time to see if it worked.

The next day arrived and my dad received no call from Applecare
So he proceeded to back up (double back up as everything is on Time Capsule).

Today we installed Snow Leopard back on it (just to reset back to how it arrived)

Upon deleting the Macintosh HD partition we then went to install Snow Leopard back on to the hard drive when the installer informed us we could install to that HDD

I ran Disk Verify and HDD came back with The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK
But i noticed that the Repair Disk was still available to click so i clicked it.
And it came up with some message about sorting boot parameters.
After that i could select Macintosh HD and install Snow Leopard.
Which got me thinking

What if that was i had to do in the first place but because Verify Disk had told us all appears to be in order we never clicked repair (i know fat jez.................. i hang my head in shame)

Anyway fresh install and Mountain Lion now on my dads iMac.

Cheers peeps for all your suggestions !

[anorax25]

Glad you got it sorted!

I spent ages on to Applecare and it was they who suggested the restart in 'Safe Mode' and then install. That was the only solution which worked for my system.

[s0hail]

nice going!! hope you enjoy it

[Officer M107]

I've been enjoying it since launch date. I've updated 3 macs without a problem (all of these without bootcamp) but my dad does have it. A lot of the people having the recovery problem have bootcamp so don't know if that us having an effect ????