Q: Hard Disk Damaged during Mavericks Installation

I think the problem might be Mavericks installer "finding" a hard drive fault that isn't actually there... I never had any HD trouble whatsoever until I tried installing Mavericks, and I'm pretty over-protective of my HDs, backing up twice a week, checking and repairing disk permissions, etc. I could be completely wrong, and will gladly admit it if I am, but it seems like a possible explanation.

Corey, I agree here.  If this is widespread, then something in Mavericks is triggering it. 

But I still stand by my "backups" lessons

Sometimes we have to do backup just to save us from the vendors/manufacturers

I've seen Dell computer hard drives dead upon arrival new from the store.

So that says nothing.

Hard drives are very much animated.    Electrical circuits go through it, and room temperature superconductors have not been perfected yet.  That means heat can damage electronics very easily.  And if it is not an SSD, you have a platter spinning thousands of times a second with a needle randomly jumping between locations as requested in several millisecond access times. 

My advice, if you aren't backed up, and the advice goes for anyone in this thread who apparently lost their data after install that isn't backed up, is to buy a data recovery tool and an external hard drive at least as large to recover to.   Quite a few are listed on my user tip:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-1689

a brody wrote:

 

I've seen Dell computer hard drives dead upon arrival new from the store.

 

 

Amen to that Brody!

KarryGee 

OK, if that's the case , why have I paid out £1700 for a reliable MAC to have a new hard drive go into meltdown because of MAVERICKS - my drive is 10 month old ? MAVERICKS is the common denominator here so why , suddenly, after using MACS for years , am I being quoted " HD  infant mortality" rates on what is essentially an inanimate object ?

"Infant HD mortality" is just the phrase the pros use to refer to 'early HD death'. Its a known entity.

That "X" folks had a failure during installing a huge OS upgrade does not indicate anything to do with the OS upgrade.  Thats a fallacy of composition.

A mechanical HD is hardly "inanimate" in the sense of moving parts, of which heads, spindles, platters, armature bars, are MOVING and can fail.

Macs are reliable Karry, but there are only 4 HD mfg. on earth,....Apple does not make hard drives.  Toshiba, Hitachi, WD, and Seagate make them.

Ive used Macs for many years too, and own a bit over 100 hard drives, and mess with HD a LOT,.......blaming Apple or Mavericks for a HD failure is misplaced. 

Specific data itself cannot mechanically kill a hard drive.......if a drive is "fated" to fail, it will fail on saving a picture of a fluffy bunny as soon as it will installing a new OS,.........its all just 10101010101  to a hard drive,

Ive owned many 100s of hard drives, the VERY BEST (Hitachi) can and will fail, period.   Backup of vital data is the "etched in stone" rule with all computer use. Regardless of make or model.

Contact Apple for full diagnostic and service.

Peace

A similar thing happened to me so I ran DIsk Utility Repair from the Mavericks installation screen.

It fixed a few things and then the second time the installation was fine.

After initially panicking (worried that everything was gone on my hard drive) and unable to select my original hard drive as a start up disk, I simply ran the install program again and I had no problem installing on my 2011 iMac.

I had this happen to me at 6 am this morning. Here's what I did to solve the problem:

When you're given the choices to reinstall from the disk, etc, select the option to repair. Then select your hard disk and select verify disk. You will see some errors in red. Whether they are damaged or simply incompatible with the upgrade I will let Apple resolve.

Once you are done with disk verification - select repair disk. If repair disk option is grayed out, reboot the Mac.

Once the disk repair is complete, reboot again and your installation process will begin again. Once you get asked to enter your icloud info, you're set.

This is not a one off thing. Search for "Mavericks drive damaged" in google, you will find a LOT of threads on it. I have a Mac Mini that is less than a year old with a Fusion drive sitting at home with the same issue many are reporting. The system has run perfectly since I bought it. It has never crashed, never a single issue. And it is used heavily.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23467696#23467696

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23470824#23470824

I can guaranty the drive failures were going to happen anyway. As has been stated drives can fail at any time. More than likely these drives that have failed in some way or even been corrupted had problems of one type or another before the Mavericks install was started.

There are even people that think upgrading the OS will fix problems they are/were having. The total opposite will happen. I read an article today about the 5 or 10 things to do BEFORE you upgrade to Mavericks. One of those thing was to make sure your OS is running correctly before you start and the last thing, but noted as the most important (Which IMHO should of been FIRST on the list), was to make a Full System Backup.

I have only once install a new OS over the top of an older OS and that was back years ago when I used Windows. Total disaster. Never Again. I have never done that with OS X. I always make a new partition or use another drive to do a clean fresh install and at first boot I use the Setup Assistant system to copy over all my Apps, Files and setting from my previous version of OS X. If I like the newer OS X and everything works I make TM backup of it and then wipe my drive and restore from that TM backup. But I always have the older version of OS X in another TM backup just in case I have to go back.

This is the second bite. Apple is gone inside the Serpent.

Every time a major operating system is installed, ..... there is a very small number of people who claim "this OS crashed my HD"

This is called "a typical anomaly from tens of 1000s of people installing a large chunk of data at one time on what was a hard drive about to fail"

This occurrence has been noted now for almost 20 years on Mac OS and the 'other' operating systems.

Peace

Glitch on Apple's part?   Hrm...My hard drive is just fine.    If it was a glitch on Apple's part ALL people with Mavericks would have a problem.  There is one image, it is being distributed around the world.     Nice try.  You are just evading your own responsibility.   The license agreement Apple even says it is not responsible for your data.    If you bother to read any license agreement you'd have learned that has ALWAYS been the case.    Nice try.    Trying to blame Apple for your lack of understanding, when if you had read their documentation you would understand.  Apple even came to terms with backing up way back http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1566 where it says: "It is recommended that you backup your system prior to installing any updates."  Variations of this have existed for time immemorial. The real glitch is not understand the impermanence of data.   Nope, I'm sorry, but you haven't a toe to stand on.  And no I don't defend Apple.  I don't critique it either for my own inadequacies.   I learn to cope with them.

Very well stated a brody.