Leopard won't install; says it will erase HD

A friend of mine just bought Leopard and I went over to help her install it (I've already got it on our computers and we had NO installation problems at all) and we went to install it and there was a yellow exclamation mark over her computer's HD icon and when you tried to go further it said it could not be installed because the system wasn't changeable or something and then it said if we installed it , it would erase all the information on her hard drive!! In all my years on installing stuff on Macs, I've really never seen that one before. Any ideas? I don't have a clue. Thanks for any help.

There are many reasons for that Yellow !
I assume Tiger still works. Run Tiger and use the disk utility to check and repair, if necessary, the disk and the permissions.
Then read this Mac document:
Mac OS X 10.5: Only installation option may be Erase and Install
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306877
No guarantees, but it should work.

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Drive Preparation
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
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This happened 3 times.

Greetings,
It takes around 45 minutes for the install to complete. After the first 15 minutes, or so, it will reboot, and then continue the installation. Hopefully you didn't interrupt it at a critical moment.
If you did and it won't boot at all, you may have to insert the DVD in the drive, start it up, and hold the "C" key down until you see the Apple, and little spinning graphic.
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Leopard won't install; says it will erase HD

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