Mountain Lion Installer: "OS X cannot start up from this disk."

[smilinggoat]

My primary OS drive (Disk 1) is currently running Lion 10.7.4. I have a second drive (Disk 2) which is used as a backup and test drive. I have a nightly carbon copy cloner backup which copies the data from Disk 1 to Disk 2 as a backup bootable clone. They both have Chimera 1.9.2 r1394 installed.

I added an 8gb partition to Disk 2 to use as a Mountain Lion installer from my copy I purchased from the App Store. I used that installer to try installing Mountain Lion on Disk 2 and it worked. I'm able to boot from Disk 2 into Mountain Lion and all is well.

I have now attempted to install Mountain Lion onto Disk 1, my primary drive on which I do all my real work. When I run the Mountain Lion installer, however, I get the following message when I attempt to select Disk 1 for installation: "OS X cannot start up from this disk."

I have attempted the following techniques:
• Run the installer from a USB stick
• Disconnected all other SATA devices except Disk 1
• Plugged Disk 1 into different SATA ports, including that which was used by Disk 2
• Run verify disk permissions and verify disk from the Mountain Lion installer and had no problems
• I examined the disk information in Disk Utility from the Mountain Lion installer and both Disk 1 and Disk 2 are listed as bootable.


In the screenshots below, Disk 1 is Squirrel (SCSI-0: P0-Hitachi HDS721010CL) and Disk 2 is Lemur (Ch4 M.: WDC WD10EACS-00D6B0).

I haven't been able to think of any other useful information. It's so strange that Disk 2 is a clone of Disk 1 and it's able to boot!

Does anyone have any ideas for troubleshooting? Thanks!

 

[Asus-Freak]

Is disk 1 a MBR partition?

 

[smilinggoat]

Is disk 1 a MBR partition?

Disks 1 and 2 both have GUID partition tables.

 

[artusom]

I am trying to upgrade my Lion system to ML and have the same issue. I can directly boot into Lion from Chimera or to the USB with no problems. GA-Z77-DS3H -- Hitachi 320 GB HD. Any thoughts are appreciated.

Jack

 

[smilinggoat]

I was unable to solve the problem directly and ended up successfully installing Mountain Lion to a different drive.

I installed a fresh copy of Mountain Lion on a new disk then used the Migration Assistant during the Mountain Lion Installer to copy my data from my Lion disk.

Everything seems to be working so far.

 

[smilinggoat]

One disadvantage of the disk migration method of upgrading to ML that I just noticed, is that your previous Time Machine backup will not recognize your old backups as being part of the system, even if the disk name is the same.