Failing OS X Lion installation (in loop, no control) I've been trying to upgrade my OS to Lion (still old, I know). The installation failed because "recovery system can't be created". So I backed up everything, and installed Lion on an external drive. From there, pressing cmd+R upon start (a feature available for only Lion and above), I was able to use Disk Utility to erase/reformat my normal HD. After that, I tried reinstalling Lion on my normal HD, with the external drive attached. This time the installation progressed quite far, almost to the end, but eventually it failed for the same reason as before ("recovery system can't be created").

My problem now is that every time I restart my computer, with or without the external drive (with Lion) attached, the installation of Lion on my normal HD resumes automatically, failing every time. I cannot even use cmd+R anymore. I am stuck, with no access to anything. I do not have the 10.6 installation DVD that came with my purchase years ago, so unfortunately that is presently not an option.

How should I proceed?
You should be able to boot to your external Lion disk by holding option/alt at startup to bring up the boot selector, and then selecting your external disk. Once booted, I would then proceed to erase the internal disk with Disk Utility and create a single partition, selecting GPT as the partition type and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format type. If you want to be really thorough select the zero-fill option when erasing the drive, it may help if you still have issues with creating the recovery partition as it will check every sector on the drive and reallocate any it finds to be unreliable.

While you're at it, make sure the SMART status of your drive is okay - it's not a guarantee your drive doesn't have any physical issues but it's a useful warning of impending failure.