Installing Mac OS X Leopard: Hard drive not recognized

October 26, 2007

Looks like I’m the unlikely recipient of an apparently wide-spread bug, if the number of views on this Apple forum discussion is any indication. It looks like sometimes, for an as-of-yet unknown reason, it takes the Leopard install CD a few minutes (3-4 in my case) to recognize the internal hard drive. So when you first start up the install, it doesn’t see the disk — either in the installer or in Disk Utility. (It boots up just fine in 10.4 and you can see it in the 10.4 Installer Disk Utility.)

So I rebooted a bunch of times, verified and repaired the disk in 10.4, and Leopard still didn’t see it. I read that Apple discussion, waited the few minutes in the Leopard Disk Utility, and the drive popped right up. So I’m starting the install now. Hopefully this doesn’t mean that it’ll take 5 minutes for Leopard to recognize my hard drive every time I boot.