Mountain Lion damaged my hard disk

I'm seeing a very similar issue, which I cannot believe the drive is faulty. I have an external USB drive with a few partitions for TimeMachine and other stuff, including a 10.7 installation. The disk is completely unusable in Mountain Lion, cannot even be erase or re-partition in Disk Utility. It is also no longer seen when booting holding the option key down. This drive is 2-3 months old, I cannot believe it just go bad when ML take control.

However, if I boot from a Lion usb stick, it becomes available again. Then I can reboot my Macbook pro into the 10.7 installation, however as soon as I boot into ML, it's gone again. Under 10.7, Disk Utility reports no errors about the drive or any of its partitions.

I am in the process of cloning my 10.7 installation back to the internal HD, I'll wait for some update from Apple before I try 10.8 again.

It is not possible to simply install Snow Leopard on top of Mountain Lion. The only way to install Snow Leopard on a system that is running Lion or Mountain Lion is to erase the hard drive first. Erasing the hard drive eliminated all the damaged disk structures, replacing them with brand new ones. Thus, your conclusions are not valid.

I have now restored my 10.7 install over 10.8. All is back to normal with the external fully functional and declared OK by Disk Utility. There is definetly a severe bug in the 10.8 driver making it crap out against some drives.

Until Apple fix these bugs, I will keep away from Mountain Lion.

Three points strike me in reading your posts.

1) While your entitled to your opinions your not entitled to your own facts.

2) Ignorance is bliss

3) Fortunately not many if any readers in this forum will follow your "advice"

Good Luck

I think the conclusion of this topic is, until Apple fix the bugs, you better keep away from Montain Lion

That is not a conclusion based on facts, unfortunately. But I believe further discussion is futile at this point. We will simply have to let those others who may read this decide for themselves what to believe.

Same problem as conniefromottawa

i have a mac mini early 2009 and i have the same problem

Just to be clear, Mountain Lion did not damage my disk. Even though I did attempt to re-format and re-partition it, these operations just failed in ML. But once I booted into a 10.7 installation, the drive was back with its partitions and all the files intact as far as I know. Actually, I'm now running 10.7 from my internal HD, which was restored from the 10.7 installation on that external drive.

So, although I'd say there obviously are bugs in the driver that ML uses, at least it did not damage my drive. Neverless, until these bugs are fixed, I have no choice but to keep away from ML.

I have similar problems with an external USB 3 harddisk bought 9 months ago. Before upgrading my MacBook Air from Lion to Mountain Lion, I made a backup of the MacBook and it worked fine. However, backing up after having installed Mountain Lion on the same disk did not work. The disk could not be mounted anymore. Neither could I use the DiskUtilities to verify or repair the disk.

My first thought was, that the disk was broken, but the disk can be mounted fine on a Linux system, and the contents can be read without any problems.

As unbeliveable as it sounds, this hints to an incompatibility of the file system drivers in Mountain Lion with that of Lion.

Ok, here's my 2 cents:

I upgraded my 2011 MacBook Pro to Mountain Lion from Lion and I have had to reload Mountain Lion 4 times due to disk errors that Disk Utility couldn't fix. Prior to ML I had no issues. I even went so far as to purchase an SSD and use my old disk as a second disk in the optical drive bay after the frist two crashes.

Today I had my fifth disk error, this time for a node error on the new SSD. There is no way my old disk and my new disk both have issues. All the ML installed were also clean installs after the first one.

Since ML install:

1. My Time Machine back ups have been flakey.
2. Aperture has been crashing allot!
3. I've gotten disk errors including node errors, string errors and other errors I can't remember that disk utility can't recover.

Today, as I said, I got my fifth disk error. It happened after Aperture crashed while generating previews. After the Aperture crash I reopened it and it crashed again. I then rebooted the computer and it shut right down after it tried to restart. As I have had this issue too much lately I knew exactly what was going on. I booted the computer with the recovery partition and tried to repair the hard drive with disk utility only to be told, once again, that the error was not recoverable and to back up as many files as I could. Funny that, it askes you to back up the files but then refuses to mount the drive so you can do it.

Anyway, I finally broke down and purchased DiskWarrior. Booting through an external hard drive and running DiskWarrior fixed the directory issue on the "crashed" drive.

You can say what you want, but the evidence is clear to me. No issues when running Lion, multiple issues, with multiple hard drives, after installing Mountain Lion.

BTW Apple, why is it that an external company can make a program that fixes your computer better than you can?

Guys, it happened again. I was exporting a library in Aperture and I had a Kernel Panic. Here's the info:

Interval Since Last Panic Report: 189374 sec

Panics Since Last Report: 1

Anonymous UUID: FBCC233F-A4EB-423B-82DE-910B24C862BB

Mon Aug 27 10:57:55 2012

panic(cpu 4 caller 0xffffff8005843d2b): "a freed zone element has been modified in zone: buf.8192"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-2050.9.2/osfmk/kern/zalloc.c:214

Backtrace (CPU 4), Frame : Return Address

0xffffff81d6383130 : 0xffffff800581d5f6

0xffffff81d63831a0 : 0xffffff8005843d2b

0xffffff81d63831e0 : 0xffffff80058435a2

0xffffff81d63832c0 : 0xffffff80058de898

0xffffff81d6383310 : 0xffffff80058de355

0xffffff81d63833c0 : 0xffffff80058dd60b

0xffffff81d63833f0 : 0xffffff80058dd7b7

0xffffff81d6383410 : 0xffffff8005ae7dd6

0xffffff81d6383480 : 0xffffff8005b2083c

0xffffff81d63834a0 : 0xffffff8005b21904

0xffffff81d6383540 : 0xffffff8005b1d890

0xffffff81d6383650 : 0xffffff8005ae9cd5

0xffffff81d63837e0 : 0xffffff8005ae99d8

0xffffff81d6383870 : 0xffffff8005af9708

0xffffff81d6383a90 : 0xffffff8005911634

0xffffff81d6383ad0 : 0xffffff80058eb75c

0xffffff81d6383b50 : 0xffffff80058eb14e

0xffffff81d6383c10 : 0xffffff80059059d2

0xffffff81d6383d90 : 0xffffff80058fe3cc

0xffffff81d6383f50 : 0xffffff8005be17da

0xffffff81d6383fb0 : 0xffffff80058cecf3

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: Aperture

Mac OS version:

12B19

Kernel version:

Darwin Kernel Version 12.1.0: Tue Aug 14 13:29:55 PDT 2012; root:xnu-2050.9.2~1/RELEASE_X86_64

Kernel UUID: 3005059E-270B-3B9F-940D-7A66C05DDC9D

Kernel slide: 0x0000000005600000

Kernel text base: 0xffffff8005800000

System model name: MacBookPro8,3 (Mac-942459F5819B171B)

System uptime in nanoseconds: 13025166820971

last loaded kext at 64492903674: com.apple.filesystems.afpfs 10.0 (addr 0xffffff7f87bb8000, size 348160)

last unloaded kext at 169439259121: com.apple.driver.AppleUSBUHCI 5.1.5 (addr 0xffffff7f861d6000, size 65536)

loaded kexts:

com.Cycling74.driver.Soundflower 1.6.2

com.logmein.driver.LogMeInSoundDriver 1.0.0

com.apple.filesystems.afpfs 10.0

com.apple.nke.asp_tcp 7.0.0

com.apple.driver.AppleHWSensor 1.9.5d0

com.apple.filesystems.autofs 3.0

com.apple.filesystems.ntfs 3.10

com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyHIDDriver 122

com.apple.driver.AGPM 100.12.69

com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager 4.0.9f8

com.apple.driver.AppleHDA 2.3.0f2

com.apple.driver.AppleUpstreamUserClient 3.5.10

com.apple.driver.AudioAUUC 1.60

com.apple.kext.AMDFramebuffer 8.0.0

com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyDriver 2.3.0f2

com.apple.driver.AppleMuxControl 3.2.6

com.apple.iokit.BroadcomBluetoothHCIControllerUSBTransport 4.0.9f8

com.apple.AMDRadeonAccelerator 1.0.0

com.apple.iokit.IOUserEthernet 1.0.0d1

com.apple.driver.AppleLPC 1.6.0

com.apple.driver.AppleSMCPDRC 1.0.0

com.apple.driver.AppleMCCSControl 1.0.33

com.apple.driver.AppleIntelHD3000Graphics 8.0.0

com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X 7.0.0

com.apple.driver.ApplePolicyControl 3.2.6

com.apple.driver.ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin 1.0.0

com.apple.driver.AppleSMCLMU 2.0.2d0

com.apple.driver.SMCMotionSensor 3.0.2d6

com.apple.driver.AppleIntelSNBGraphicsFB 8.0.0

com.apple.driver.AppleUSBTCButtons 235.4

com.apple.driver.AppleUSBTCKeyboard 235.4

com.apple.driver.AppleIRController 320.15

com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataless 1.0.0d1

com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeZlib 1.0.0d1

com.apple.BootCache 34

com.apple.driver.XsanFilter 404

com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIBlockStorage 2.2.1

com.apple.driver.AppleUSBHub 5.1.6

com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI 4.9.5

com.apple.iokit.AppleBCM5701Ethernet 3.2.5b3

com.apple.driver.AirPort.Brcm4331 601.15.21

com.apple.driver.AppleAHCIPort 2.4.0

com.apple.driver.AppleUSBEHCI 5.1.5

com.apple.driver.AppleEFINVRAM 1.6.1

com.apple.driver.AppleSmartBatteryManager 161.0.0

com.apple.driver.AppleACPIButtons 1.6

com.apple.driver.AppleRTC 1.5

com.apple.driver.AppleHPET 1.7

com.apple.driver.AppleSMBIOS 1.9

com.apple.driver.AppleACPIEC 1.6

com.apple.driver.AppleAPIC 1.6

com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementClient 196.0.0

com.apple.nke.applicationfirewall 4.0.39

com.apple.security.quarantine 2

com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement 196.0.0

com.apple.security.SecureRemotePassword 1.0

com.apple.kext.triggers 1.0

com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily 3.5.1

com.apple.iokit.IOSerialFamily 10.0.6

com.apple.driver.DspFuncLib 2.3.0f2

com.apple.driver.AppleBacklightExpert 1.0.4

com.apple.iokit.AppleBluetoothHCIControllerUSBTransport 4.0.9f8

com.apple.iokit.IOAcceleratorFamily 19.0.26

com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily 1.8.9fc9

com.apple.kext.OSvKernDSPLib 1.6

com.apple.iokit.IOSurface 86.0.2

com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireIP 2.2.5

com.apple.kext.AMD6000Controller 8.0.0

com.apple.kext.AMDSupport 8.0.0

com.apple.driver.AppleHDAController 2.3.0f2

com.apple.iokit.IOHDAFamily 2.3.0f2

com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusController 1.0.10d0

com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusPCI 1.0.10d0

com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothFamily 4.0.9f8

com.apple.driver.AppleGraphicsControl 3.2.6

com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport 2.3.4

com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginLegacy 1.0.0

com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginFamily 5.2.0d16

com.apple.driver.AppleSMC 3.1.3d11

com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily 2.3.4

com.apple.driver.AppleThunderboltDPInAdapter 1.8.5

com.apple.driver.AppleThunderboltDPAdapterFamily 1.8.5

com.apple.driver.AppleThunderboltPCIDownAdapter 1.2.5

com.apple.driver.AppleUSBMultitouch 235.7

com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHIDDriver 5.0.0

com.apple.driver.AppleUSBMergeNub 5.1.5

com.apple.driver.AppleUSBComposite 5.0.0

com.apple.driver.AppleThunderboltNHI 1.6.0

com.apple.iokit.IOThunderboltFamily 2.0.3

com.apple.iokit.IOUSBUserClient 5.0.0

com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily 4.5.5

com.apple.iokit.IOEthernetAVBController 1.0.2b1

com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family 500.15

com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily 3.0

com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIFamily 2.2.0

com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily 5.1.6

com.apple.iokit.IOHIDFamily 1.8.0

com.apple.driver.AppleEFIRuntime 1.6.1

com.apple.iokit.IOSMBusFamily 1.1

com.apple.security.sandbox 220

com.apple.kext.AppleMatch 1.0.0d1

com.apple.security.TMSafetyNet 7

com.apple.driver.DiskImages 344

com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily 1.8

com.apple.driver.AppleKeyStore 28.18

com.apple.driver.AppleACPIPlatform 1.6

com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily 2.7

com.apple.iokit.IOACPIFamily 1.4

com.apple.kec.corecrypto 1.0

Model: MacBookPro8,3, BootROM MBP81.0047.B27, 4 processors, Intel Core i7, 2.2 GHz, 16 GB, SMC 1.70f5

Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000, Intel HD Graphics 3000, Built-In, 512 MB

Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6750M, AMD Radeon HD 6750M, PCIe, 1024 MB

Memory Module: BANK 0/DIMM0, 8 GB, DDR3, 1333 MHz, 0x857F, 0x483634314755363746393333334700000000

Memory Module: BANK 1/DIMM0, 8 GB, DDR3, 1333 MHz, 0x857F, 0x483634314755363746393333334700000000

AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0xD6), Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.106.98.81.21)

Bluetooth: Version 4.0.9f8 10405, 2 service, 11 devices, 1 incoming serial ports

Network Service: Ethernet, Ethernet, en0

Serial ATA Device: INTEL SSDSC2CW480A3, 480.1 GB

Serial ATA Device: TOSHIBA MK7559GSXF, 750.16 GB

USB Device: hub_device, 0x0424 (SMSC), 0x2514, 0xfa100000 / 3

USB Device: BRCM2070 Hub, 0x0a5c (Broadcom Corp.), 0x4500, 0xfa110000 / 5

USB Device: Bluetooth USB Host Controller, apple_vendor_id, 0x821a, 0xfa113000 / 7

USB Device: Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad, apple_vendor_id, 0x0245, 0xfa120000 / 4

USB Device: FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in), apple_vendor_id, 0x8509, 0xfa200000 / 2

USB Device: hub_device, 0x0424 (SMSC), 0x2514, 0xfd100000 / 2

USB Device: IR Receiver, apple_vendor_id, 0x8242, 0xfd110000 / 3

Anyone know what's causing it by this?

I'm not technical enough to know if this is all true or not but here are my facts regarding this topic.

1. Installed ML

2. Plugged in Seagate Free Agent 4TB FW800 HDD's (one of two) that worked without problem in Lion.

3. One morning, I click on the drive ... no data on it. It had 3TB on it. I didn't shut off my Mac, I just let it goto sleep while I was sleeping. It was just not appearing.

4. Ran Disc Warrior which rebuilt the .DS Store and the drive was back to normal. Unfortunately, I've had to do this at least 6 times now.

5. Finally, I got scared and copied all of the data to my 2nd 4TB Free Agent Drive lastnight. I let it run overnight.

6. I woke up this morning. Clicked on both of the drives and they had no data on them.

7. Rebooted the Mac - window appeared saying they needed to be initialized. I ignored that and ran Disc Warrior again and this time it fixed both drives and the data was available again and the drives were both renamed "Untitled".

Same problem on both drives? Seems fishy to me but I'm not a tech ninja so who knows.

Anyway, I just wanted to report this. Maybe someone at Apple is reading. Who knows.

I too had the problem of trying to install the latest Mountain Lion OS download. I got the error message that the hard drive was damaged and could not be repaired. I know that's BS so I repaired the disk permissions and I copied the OS installation program to a 16 GB USB drive.

I was able to install Mountain Lion off that USB drive.

I was able to install the new OS on my Macbook Pro 13 inch previously running OS 10.6.8.

I hope this helps.

I am using an mid 2010 iMac 2.93 GHz i7 quad core, 8 GB, 2TB internal HD and a Total of 5.5 TB external HD Capacity including an 8 Month old WD Mybook Studio II 4TB Quad external HD solely for Time Machine!

Everything was running smoothly in Lion checking my HD's pretty regularily with DU! The internal HD always showed Permissions differ from expected but according to Apple "This is 'NORMAL' and 'does not cause Problems'(??) I wonder why does it show these as different from expexted if it's supposed to be "normal"?

But anyway, all my other disks including the 4TB WD 'appear OK' acc.to DU!!

About 4 days ago I upgraded to ML! I stopped Time Machine from doing automatic Backups and did not check! All seemed to run w/o any problem so I thought everything's OK!

But on Thurs Sep 27,2012 when I wanted reactivate TM and start backing up again it could NOT find it's Backup Disk! and the disk was not in the Finder anymore!! So I brought it to the Apple Store for them to help/check/exchange this for me obviously defective disk only to hear they are NOT able/willing to help me!

The Store Mgr went 'kind of' out of his way and explained "WHY they can't" and I have to contact WD myself!!??

I really did not understand this kind of "Policy"! I bought the Disk in the Apple Store to be 'protected' only to learn I am wrong! They 'can't/don't want to' help and leave it to the idiot of customer who bought a "3rd Party Product" even though it was bought from them in their(Apple) Store!?

Needless to say I WILL NEVER AGAIN ANY '3rd Party' Product from Apple! They want to reap in the Profits for these Products but then leave the Customer completely alone asking him to do THEIR DUTY! Anyway:

It was now Friday Sept 2012 about 8pm and I did not get contact with any person but a Computer at WD!

This Computer was not of any help what so ever (intentionally?) I could not even even submit a Exchange/Return request! I always got into a "Loop"! I was NOT able to submit my Shipping address! It requested it but it did NOT accept it and asked for it again and again!!?? I just gave up on this "24/7 ?SERVICE? and think my reactioni s quite understandable!!

So I decided to connect the failing disk again and got very surprised that this time it showed up in the Finder!?

OK, I thought "a glitch" and run Time Machine again!

After a long time it came back telling me it can not backup to this disk!

I then ran DU again which this time knew the disk and ran a repair on it! This took several hours so I let it run over night!

Next morning The Disk was done in DU and had 'ALL Data showing up' !!

It's now Saturday Sep 29, 2012 12pm and Time Machine is currently backing up on it !!?? So far it does not complain and I am hoping the ordeal is over!

So it looks like it was not the Disk being faulty (before ML it always checked out fine) it was the OS causing or showing a very annoying/frustrating and very Time consuming problem! Whose fault??

Until now it looks like I just had a bad time and was left alone!! For me it confirmed that Corporates are only interested to maxmize their Profits! They don't think that the way they do it on the backs of their customers can NOT work forever and WILL eventually cause their fall! They are short sighted and are interested in the present only! "Who cares about the future customer(s), there are soo many prospects!" But there number is not endless and dimishes daily!

Thanks to all involved!