Mac OS X snow leopard cannot be installed because the disk cannot be used to start up your computer

Snow leopard, the latest Mac operating system also called as Mac OS X 10.6 comprises of several advanced features and major updates for enhanced performance and security. For installing snow leopard disk partition table should be in clean state. Any error in the table will lead to failure of OS X installation process and would generate errors as such “snow leopard installer reports that disk cannot be used to startup your computer”.

Talking of a particular case when installing snow leopard you observe the following-

  • snow leopard installer fails to recognize boot drive and reports it invalid destination for Mac OS X.
  • The drive is displayed with a yellow triangle on it
  • The installer reports that the system is unable to boot from the drive when the drive is selected.

In such a situation you would be unable to boot up computer and the most obvious cause of the error is that snow leopard installer finds issues with disk partition table. Owing to the fact that booting from a corrupted drive would not be successful, snow leopard does not get installed. For fixing the problem of snow leopard installer
  • Disk sanity is checked using start up disk utility
  • Booting system with installation disk of snow leopard and then from utilities menu go to disk utility
  • Repartition the drive with it
  • If drive repartition fails clean install of OS is required

With reinstallation the entire existing data would be removed and for restoring the lost data back you need to use data recovery mac if you don’t have an updated valid backup. Data recovery mac is a powerful utility that locate and extract drives data when drive scan is carried with it. The results so obtained from the search is the list of all files and folders stored there displayed in a tree like structure, just the files to be restored has to be selected from there and then saved to a specific location. It supports Mac OS X 10.6 snow leopard, 10.5 leopard, 10.4 tiger, 10.3.9 panther HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS wrapper file system volumes.