Help! MAC OS X Lion says, "Disk damaged... cannot be repaired."

carolsm,

You have done absolutely nothing wrong, there is no need for you to apologize. Please do not allow the immaturity, anger issues, bipolarism, comments or attacks of others in the Support Community to affect you in any way. Some people are just like that. It is best just to ignore them.

We (the Apple Support Community) welcome everyone. The more people that we have contributing to this Community, the more possible solutions we can give to those that come here looking for a solution to their computer problems.

I personally want to WELCOME you to our COMMUNITY and wish to see more suggestions and tips from you in the future.... Your expertise is highly valued by all of us.

And as per the TOU you are still advised to simply start your own thread. There are a lot of reasons that can cause your issues but by addressing them in someone else's thread is ill advised and rarely helps you solve your problem.

Pete

I never said Apple was covering this issue up to sell new hds, or that this was a massive widespread issue

Carol, you certainly did imply it. You said:

I believethere is a serious issue with Lion that causest his but Apple is not willing to help. They want me to buy a new hd!

When people say such things, the fallacy needs to be pointed out, lest someone else reading later finds the post unchallenged and draws the inaccurate conclusion that it is true. Of course, that said, there are nasty ways to do that and nicer ways to do that, and there didn't seem to be any reason for anyone to get nasty with you.

Thomas A Reed wrote:

I never said Apple was covering this issue up to sell new hds, or that this was a massive widespread issue

Carol, you certainly did imply it. You said:

I believethere is a serious issue with Lion that causest his but Apple is not willing to help. They want me to buy a new hd!

When people say such things, the fallacy needs to be pointed out, lest someone else reading later finds the post unchallenged and draws the inaccurate conclusion that it is true. Of course, that said, there are nasty ways to do that and nicer ways to do that, and there didn't seem to be any reason for anyone to get nasty with you.

you are still advised to simply start your own thread

What is so nasty about that? Hundreds of posts advising the same thing.

Pete

I wasn't referring to that.

We do welcome everyone. I only want to say, that tagging onto another thread makes it very difficult to ensure that a person who needs help gets the right answers. First off, similar symptoms of computer issues can be caused by very different issues. Give the example of a bad directory, it can show up as a hard drive that is invisible, which is the same symptom as a dead or dying hard drive. Would it be good advice to tell everyone with those symptoms to get Disk Warrior? No. While Disk Warrior has data recovery facilities, it won't work on a dying hard drive. There are many other utilities that will. For those who haven't been backed up, giving them those tools is much better than just advising Disk Warrior when they have no backup. Determining which tool is necessary requires questions and answers. If someone comes in and interrupts their thread, making sure the right person gets the right advice gets harder.

Furthermore, as I say, if you start your own thread, people of community are more likely to pay attention to your individual problem, and get it solved quicker. I tend to ignore long threads. And I'm sure there are others who do as well. I am sorry if you took offense. That was not the intent.

Thank you for the kind words. Just wanted to let you know I took my laptop again to the store today and requested they try the reinstalling snow leopard disk as suggested here and it was sucessful. No issues with my hard drive. Everything is working perfectly.

I had the same problem, twice so far, and am excited to see if the issue pops up again on my iMac. The first time on my Mid 2011 Macbook Air, I was able to do a quick repair disk and everything went fine. The second time, on my slightly older 27" iMac at work, I thought I had hosed myself as I couldn't repair the disk at first, had to restart so that I could repair the disk, restart again because OS X Mountain Lion install said the disk was now locked, and then it allowed me to move forward with the install. (There was a bit where I thought I was in muddy water on that one, especially since our company is between IT Coordinators at the moment, and I don't have access to our original install disks.)

Don't jump to wiping your hard drive too quickly. Play with repairing the disk and restarting to see if you can resolve it that way first. I do think there is some issue with installing Mountain Lion, so for anyone considering doing it, I'd suggest doing a recovery restart and repairing your disk with OS X shut down before trying to install. That might avoid some of the headache and worry.

Thank you Jsd2.

I FIGURED OUT HOW TO FIX THIS! Mavericks royally messed up my HD and I was freaking out because I didn't have a back-up. After much research online and going back and forth from different forums here is how to fix your "damaged" HD.

So basically to save your data (if your disk is cannot be repaired in Disk Utility or you can't access it or if you keep getting stuck in the loop), you have use an external hard drive as the start up disk and install Lion or Mavericks on that then transfer your files from the HD to the external. Then shut down the computer, remove the external (so it tries to boot up on its own), go into Recovery Mode then to Disk Utility and do a level 7 erase (it will be in your security options under erase. It's the Most Secure one that the US Department of Defense uses. This will take about 12 hours and once that is done, restart your computer in Recovery Mode then reinstall Lion. To transfer your data back on your computer, plug in the external and use it as a hard drive, your data will be under the User folder and whatever username you use. TAKE THAT APPLE.