Q: When installing Yosemite, received error "File system verify or repair failed"

You'll have to determine whether you have a bad hard drive or if your disk just became corrupted somehow.

If the latter, your best bet is to reformat your drive and restore from your last backup.

If the former, you'll need a new hard drive.

EEverything working fine for me until I was going through install of Yosemite and get that same message

os x could not be installed on your computer

file system verify or repair failed

quit the installer to restart your computer and try again

i do all this and it restarts, looks like installing and boom this message pops up over and over and over

can I get back to mavericks now somehow?   I'm green, first Mac, 27 inch had less than two years

same here..

when trying to repair the disk in disk utilities, he cant do that, and say again : try to repair ...

on mavericks with mac mini late 2012..

i was able to  reboot on mavericks when quit the Yosemite updater.  ....

(sorry for my english)

Now i back up my files...

after that, i will try to reboot , cmd+R and repair my hard drive with "mavericks disk repair tool" if available...

now i can see error on my disk when i launch disk utilities... but he was not unable to repair with the "Yosemite disk utilities" so i will try with "mavericks session " to see what will happend...

The issue is that Apple has added a basic disk check to the Yosemite install process.

If it finds a disk issue that cannot be repaired it will refuse to install Yosemite rather than just blindly install it onto a disk with issues.

If the installer reports issues they were preexisting and must be corrected before you can upgrade.

So how do you go back to Mavericks and fix those issues so you can go back in and install Yosemite?

I Have the same issue here, some posts suggest that there is no enough space on the hard drive. However, I'm trying to get back to my hd disk to boot to my dssktop, unfortunately I couldnt, now I need only to know how to eject the installing drive and reboot using my old drive.

also I tried to do something useful with terminal that provided in recovery mode, but also I'm not good in this too.

dont know what to do

ssame issue here. Glad I.m not the first.

Had the same problem on a MBP 17 (early 2009).

Long story short. I used the ORIGINAL installer CD to boot to Disk Utility and REPAIR Permissions an Disk. Had to reboot several times (holding C down) until the HD was recognized and Disk Utility allowed me to "repair" it (REPAIR was disabled previously).

Once I was able to REPAIR the disk I rebooted normally and was able to log in back into Maverick. Now doing one more BACKUP before attempting to install Yosemite again.

Useful link: http://african-heart.blogspot.com/2010/07/fixing-invalid-node-structure-in-mac.h tml?showComment=1365269696276#c4328371437324677074

I am facing the same issue. When installing Yosemite Getting the error ""File system verify or repair failed". I have a macbook pro late 2009. What should i do before i attempt to reinstall yosemite?

I'm having the same issue on an early 2011 MBP

Tried to install Yosemite, failed to verify or repair disk

reboot in command R mode. Brings up disk utility

says something about file system error 8 when I check the disk

the disk contains 2 partitions the os x base and an os x esd install disk

both individually pass the disk utility verify - but the physical disk containing them does not

everything worked fine under mavericks

this is is a huge time suck. I use macs because they "just work"

now im going to spend hours restoring

this is on top of iOS 8.0.1 which hosed my phone a couple weeks ago

If anyone has a better solution than restoring - please let me know

I Have the same exact problem. Disk utility is not helping. same thing after every restart.