Trying to upgrade, OS X installer can't find hard drive The hard drive in my mom's MacBook (2,1) was dying so I got her an Adata SSD and replaced the original hard drive with it. I booted it up with her original Mac OS 10.4 install CD and used disk utility to format the SSD to have a single HSF+ partition and successfully installed Mac OS 10.4 on her laptop. 

Next I tired to upgrade the OS using my Mac OS 10.5 install CD, but the installer reports that it couldn't detect Mac OS 10.4 on the computer. This is not true, when started, the laptop can boot right into Tiger. 

When I turned on disk utility, in the OS 10.5 installer, no hard drive could be found. When I ran the command "diskutil list" in the terminal, in the OS 10.5 installer, no hard drive was found. However when I ran System Profiler, in the installer, I could find that under

Hardware > Serial-ATA 

there was an "ADATA SP900" under "Intel ICH7-M AHCI" so the installer knows there is a drive there, even if it isn't detecting it. 

How can I get the installer to recognize that I have Mac OS installed on my mom's laptop?
I got it to work by booting my mom's computer in target disk mode and attaching my Mac with a firewire cable and rebooting my computer with the installer cd. 

The installer, running on my computer, was able to recognize her disk and I was able to install the update. 

Unfortunately this solution required a second mac to work, and both macs need to have a firewire port (which are quickly disappearing from Apple's products).