Install Failed - Disk is damaged

The details of that repair will be in the log of Disk Utility. Could you paste those few lines (not the entire log) here?

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Thanks

Ok, I managed to resolve my problem.

I couldn't repair the disk using the Mac OSX ultilities Disk Utility that appeared during the Lion Installation. I pulled out my Snow Leopard disk, and ran Disk Utility there. Same problem, it could not repair the disk. I then tried the following:

1. In disk utility(when booted on my Snow Leopard disk), I unmounted my partition(mine was called Macintosh HD). To do this I clicked on my drive and clicked the Unmount button. I then quit Disk Utility.

2. I then opened Terminal(also found under Utilities on the Snow Leopard disk). When that opened I entered fsck_hfs -rf /dev/disk0s2. This took about 10-15 mins. It eventually ended and said that it had repaired my disk. Success! I closed Terminal. Your partition may be called something other than disk0s2...make sure you know what it is.

3. I went back into Disk Utility(while still booted on my Snow Leopard Disk), mounted my Macintosh HD drive and reran verify disk. This reported no problems!

3. I then restarted my machine and held down the Option button. Instead of seeing OSX Installer that I had seen when I had got stuck in the Lion installation loop, I had my Macintosh HD drive back! (and my Bootcamp partition)

4. Once logged in, the Lion installation app was still in my dock, so I clicked on it again, and this time it installed no problem.

I use Super Duper... I wonder if that had anything to do with it. Anyway, I now have Lion - it's awesome.

Good luck, I really hope you find a way around this.

Trouble, I can't tell if you're joking or not.

The large exclamation mark screen that pops up says,"Mac OS X Lion couldn't be installed, because the disc Macintosh HD is damaged and can't be repaired."

That is not what you want to see when you install a new OS update. How do we suddenly get "broken hard drives" doing an install? And you are excited be be back at less than square one? Haha.

Bart, please be serious, all that? Not to mention how do we reclaim our $30? Lame!!

Well I reformatted the HD and restored everything using TM. For some reason Iphoto didn't restore properly but once I downloaded it from the App store that recovered also. Of course it cost me $14.99. :-(

Should I try to install lion again and if so how do I ensure a good install? I have 20Gig free on my HD.

Steve, apologies if the way I wrote it made you think I was joking. I am definitely not. I was just very excited that I was able to get my Mac drive back and may have overused the exclamation marks...I thought I had lost everything. My Mac drive has all my photos and music and I had stupidly forgotten to backup before I started the process.

Anyway, if you read my first post, my original error when running verify disk was "invalid node structure". I searched for "fsck_hfs invalid node structure" in google to find my solution. You can verify what I said looking through other posts that come back from that search.

I hope that helps.

Bart, it was trouble1220 that I thought was joking, but I was being facetious. I find it funny that he was excited that he got screwed over.

My comment to your post was meant to be about how you have to be a genius to figure out how to fix this problem. Your explanation is well written. I know my way around the Mac OS pretty well, but I've never had to use the terminal or partition a HD. I made the mistake by not backing up my computer to a disk image before the install, but I've never had to do it before. Lesson learned. I've always been the guy who reads posts about people having outrageous problems and saying to myself, "Why does this stuff happen to people? Apple stuff always runs smooth for me". Now I'm amazed that an installer like this can trap us with no way out. I brought my tower in to my work and IT is going to look at it. When we fix the problem I will publish our results.

Thanks, Steve M

Ok, got the same problem... I CAN NOT BELIEVE how this was released without testing....

This is how I was able to boot my MAC again.

When you turn on the unit, press the OPTION/ALT button, this will give the oportunity to boot your computer from the original "Hard Drive". Lion creates a partion so you need to tell your computer to boot from the original one..

I had the self same problem.

Took a visit to Apple Store and help of a Genius to sort it. Need to remember that you need to be booting from the Snow Leopard DVD (or another Apple store Boot Drive) to use Disk Utility as you can't repair the disk you are working from (you can't repair a chair you are sitting on!!!).

Making sure that you have a recent back up on Time Machine, you can then erase the disk and then install a known good version of Lion Guys in Apple Stores have them on a Zip Drive. When you boot Lion for the first time, set up a User profile called TO DELETE as you can't import a User profile and content with the same name as the one you are using. Make sure that your computer name is the same as the name you had under Snow Leopard as otherwise you will freak your Time Machine out!

Once Lion is up and running you can use Migration Assistant to get all of your files back. Then just delete the user profile.

bart2906 wrote:

2. I then opened Terminal(also found under Utilities on the Snow Leopard disk). When that opened I entered fsck_hfs -rf /dev/disk0s2. This took about 10-15 mins. It eventually ended and said that it had repaired my disk. Success! I closed Terminal.

As you have discovered, Disk Utility's "Repair Disk" is just a front end for the fsck program. When running fsck is any form, the rule of thumb is to run it over and over again until it either fails or no longer finds something to fix. Sometimes it will fix one thing, but there will still be something else that needs to be fixed that can't be worked on until that first thing is fixed. So don't get suckered in to thinking -- "oh, it fixed my problem, I'm done." 99% of the time, yes, it did, and another fsck would be clean, but for that other 1%...

Once you get booted up, you can use Disk Utility, and do a "Verify" without a repair. If it all checks out, then don't worry. If it shows something else to repair, then you have to get it booted into single-user mode, or off an install disk, etc., and get it repaired.

Okay, back from the holidays now and can continue investigating the issue.

For some reason, I cannot boot up from my Snow Leopard DVD: it just makes a sound like it's booting from the DVD but eventually freezes up where there is just apple logo in the screen. Otherwise I always end up with Lion installation utility.

I opened terminal to try and run the fsck_hfs as suggested, but this probably fails for two reasons: the partition is being active but also to the fcsk giing error of "Node failure. Disk full" or something along those lines. I wonder if the repair needs more space, the volume has some 6Gb of free out of 1TB.

But the internal disk is mounted as read only, so I can't delete anything.

My next plan is to make a Lion boot DVD with my MBP which was updated just fine and try to use its tools to fix this.

I agree with the previous posts that this has been a poor decision from Apple to run the disk utility at this point with no options to revert the installation process, hence rendering the whole computer into this state.

What does Disk Utility say about the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive?

When you select the physical drive on the left in Disk Utility (the left justified one above the volume names), does it give the S.M.A.R.T. status at the bottom?

If it is failing that, the hard drive itself is reporting it has problems and needs to be serviced. "Direct from the horses mouth" as it were.

I haven't seen that mentioned here.

ivan

What I ended up doing might be a complicated way around things but I installed Lion onto a backup empty hard drive and from there backed up all of my important files from the Macbook's original HD onto the other drive. I then completely erased the HD and installed Snow Leopard onto the Macbook's HD just to make sure everything went smoothly and then updated to Lion. I'm now using Lion on the Macbook! It doesn't have exactly the same settings and everything but I have all of my files. Hope this helps someone!

If these details matter here's from a failed lion install log file regarding my damaged disk. error was invalid node

Bookmark failed to issue extension for item (depth=4000): no such directory

Keyboard layouts duplicate keyboard layout identifier -16899

Keyboard layout identifier has been replaced with -28673

...

Unable to find authentication module ConfugurationProfiles

Unable to find service discovery callback for module 'PlistFile

Module plistfile client is using a native record type config which is not portable

Client is using an old record type type dsrectypenative:config/share points should be using kODRecordtypesharepoints

The thing is my dusk really isn't damaged until lion gets ahold of it. I'll do one more install after this transfer of files using a cd that lion is on. Does that file have to be on a bootable cd or can it just exist on the cd as an executable app?