Mavericks will not install on brand new Hard Drive

Question

Trying to install Mavericks to a brand new internal 2TB Samsung SATA 3.0 HD on a 3-yr old 12 Core Mac Pro system that was running Mnt Lion just fine. After multiple failures upgrading the Mnt Lion disk to Mavericks. Decided to just use a brand spankin' new hard drive and do a clean install of Mavericks. Now during the install to the NEW DRIVE, getting error message "Mavericks cannot be installed." Then I reboot and try to force the continuation of the install, doing this repeatedly, and I sometimes get a error log instead of a just an error message. Error log says: Thread 34 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.root.high-priority.  Then the 1st line listed under that is: 0 libsystem_platform.dylib  0x000000010fa5a06a _platform_memmove$VARIANT$Nehalem + 138. If anybody knows what any of that means?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Without the full listing of the trace I can't be sure, however it would look more like a bonafide logic board or memory error rather than the HD that's causing  the problem. The low level drivers on Mavericks have obviously changed (otherwise it wouldn't be a different OS version) and possibly they're exposing a lack of performance in your memory. The actual Mavericks install may not be the problem, but rather being corrupted during installation. In the line you quoted, Nehalem is the Intel name for your CPU, the memmove operation failed (move blocks of memory contents from point A to point B) and they shared library containing this was in the system library....sort of critical stuff.
You could try the following:
Re-seat the RAM and try again.
Try an old OS installation and see if it succeeds (Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, etc)
Try an install to an external enclosure
If re-seating the RAM does the trick, then you're set.
If it doesn't, then install an older OS to see if they work OK. If older OSes work OK using the internal drive and you have after market memory in the system, it would imply to me that the memory probably isn't quite up to snuff and Mavericks is exposing it. If it's original memory then it should be OK.
If the older OSes now don't install correctly and it's giving similar problems try doing the install in an external enclosure. The point here being to try to move your data path off the internal SATA cable. If these install OK, try it with Mavericks. If any of these work it could be the SATA cable or I/O controllers on the logic board (SATA cable most likely).  A good reference for these sorts of problems is:
Bad Hard Drive Signs and Symptoms
Possibly a last option, which I would think (or hope) would be rare, would be that the binary for Mavericks install got corrupt during download. You could also try some of the resets they have in the linked document above. They might work and it doesn't take any effort.
Good Luck