Mountain Lion damaged my hard disk

Also, forgot to say that I also didn't load most of the third party apps I used to have when I started having to do fresh OS installs. I also made sure that the ones I did load had been checked for ML compatibility.

Despite that it still had issues.

I've used Macs and PCs professionally for many years, and I am having trouble with Mountain Lion messing up the boot partition in such a way that Disk Utility cannot fix.

It has happened on two machines (a MacBook Pro portable and an early 2008 Mac Pro with dual quad processors with three different Seagate drives.)

The only way I have been able to fix the partition was to totally restore it from a Time Machine backup, oddly a couple of autotimed backups away from the latest backup of the drive.

The boot volume involved had on it the system volume software, based on an "old" image, as it has been a major MacOS system drive for my work over the years, starting originally as far back as Leopard, and upgraded progressively to Mountain Lion, so I figured I would build myself a totally clean new install, starting with a clean Lion install, and see how it performed.

Spent a couple of days installing apps, and dealing with the new itunes libary as well, and I find this new drive boots faster than my old one, but I had just finished setting it up, and was looking around for a drive to back it up to a Time Machine image, and bang, a reboot into this drive resulted in errors that Disk Drive says it cannot fix, wiping out the last few days work setting up this "clean" drive.

All the files appear to be there, and the drive itself passes Disk Utility checks, but the boot partition, in this case the whole named drive (since it only has one partition) cannot be repaired by Disk Utility, and cannot be mounted.

My experience is not exactly the same as what I have read here, however it may be of interest and of help for someone having hard drive problems.

I have a large itunes library living on a WD 1TB portable My Passport (USB 3) external hard drive.

If I left my MacBook / Mountain Lion running over night or for extended periods, the external drive would go missing-in-action. iTunes would be unable to see to access the external drive. If I tried to play a song or a podcast showing in iTunes it would not be found and iTunes would ask if I wanted to locate it. If I said yes and tried to point to the external drive, the external drive would NOT be showing in finder.

Disk utility could not see the drive to mount or to repair.

A restart would not reclaim its existence.

I could shut down and remove the external USB cable and plug the drive into my secondary iMac and it wouldn't show to mount sometimes, and sometimes it would show. When it would show, I would run disk utility-repair on it and all seemed fine, so I would unmount it and reinstall to the MacBook; StartUp and everything would be cool until an extended period of time passed, and again it would go missing-in-action.

I found if I just shutdown and waited five or ten minutes to startup, the missing drive would miraculously reappear and seemingly be healed until the next time. (Now I think this rest period in effect was a power cycle of the drive, when I would remove and mount on a secondary computer sometimes it would be too quick for the drive to reset and therefore would still not be seen to mount yet)

This freaked me out; not knowing when the fatal failure would occur. Over time I bought two more 1TB external drives to backup and cover my posterior with double redundancy. Even backing up to one and wiping and reformatting fresh did not resolve the missing-in-action condition on the backup drives either.

Since it happened to multiple drives, I figured the problem to be with something in common, which pointed to Mountain Lion. I was hopeful the recent Mountain Lion Update would provide the remedy. Sadly not so.

This has been going on for months. Really frustrating. Finally I thought to check with Western Digital for any firmware updates. Hooray there is one dated mid 11/14/2012. After completing the update, I seem to be free from this scary and annoying drive gone missing-in-action after extended away time.

The firmware update notes "Made device detection more robust."

Hopefully this post can help some who have been having hard drive issues.

Further experience to my losses of boot partitions in Mountain Lion as I described above with the "clean install" disk failure. I had been unable to even mount the new clean drive that I had just built up from scratch.

I also tried the Unix commands suggested in the Apple tech support department to fix the drive, but they gave an error saying that they could do nothing because the drive was "frozen" or some words to that effect.

I was reading on the compatiblity reporting website "Roaring Apps" (http://roaringapps.com/app:419) about the troubles people were having with DiskWarrior on Mountain Lion, and one thread in particular observed that problems were seen with the updates to Mountain Lion, so on a whim, with nothing else to try, I decided to re-install Mountain Lion on the base system drive of a machine with the "faulty" drive in it running as a secondary drive, which would in effect bring my (working system) back to its pre-updated Mountain Lion version 1 point zero state.

The installation went fine, and booting worked fine on the system.

I then ran Disk Utilities from this Mountain Lion 1.0 system drive onto the faulty drive (which was still not mounting), and this did not fix the drive, but this time it actually allowed the drive to be mounted, and I have just used Carbon Capy to copy all the files from the now mounted "faulty" disk.

Only six or seven files gave errors in the cloning process, and these were itunes songs. So the problem definitely seems to be in one of the later Apple updates to Mountain Lion...

I have now had 3 external FW drives go bonkers and report similar "unreadable/back up date now" errors within days of installing mountain lion on a 2009 (?) 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro. I have 5 drives daisy chained through 2 FW 800 ports. They all worked fine on Lion. It cannot be a coincidence that this happened on ML.

The latest weirdness was on a drive that contained music. It had an mp3 folder that had several other folders named by genre, then artists and album folders. Well the second level genre folders were all gone. The top folder showed 0 items. But when I revealed in Finder a track known to be there in iTunes (that iTunes could still find), the Finder promptly showed it. It just had no parent above the album!!

I've been able to repair directories mostly with Disk Warrior, but I lack confidence this won't happen again.

It occurs to me that this problem may affect older Macs, circa 2009, only. Apple may not have properly tested these scenarios. I have filed a bug report that I expect will be marked as a duplicate.

Also have my HD damaged after installing ML. I have a macbook pro 15" mid-2010 and was a failed one, Apple just replace my locigboard because of frecuent kernel panics, there is a free replacement plan for that generation, even it's almost 3 years age, and all problems stared with the update form SL to ML.

After taking back from the service, they told my about other cases when ML damage HDs, so they want to change the HD for a new one and install the system "garantee" by them themselves, for a considerable amount of money. So it doesn't seems to be fair, why Apple sell their system online if, even following all instructions, this has to be made by technicians to be "garantee". I'm not stupid! I installed OS of all kind in my life without breaking a single pice of hardware, so now is not only the price of the OS you also have to pay for the installation of the OS, and in my case for a new HD and the installation of the HD too, that's ridiculous!

bye!

Ok Guys, I have the SAME problem. Here is what I do.

The Objective:

1. To get my files in the Internal HDD Saved. For those who forgot to backup, this is a valuable lesson

2. To get Mountain Lion up and running.

Here's what I do.

1. Buy an External HDD for files backup.

2. Buy a firewire cable

3. Do entire instruction to firewire target the old "crashing" hdd and do your buckup. read here http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1661

4. Get new USB and get an ML bootdisc. Clean install ML - using that. Should be simple, google it.

Solved. Booo apple!

How is that solved? You're suggesting not using firewire hard drives? Some of us have more than one FW hard drive and replacing them may not be an option. The solution is for Apple to fix this issue – either through free logic board replacements, or more likely, fixing the OS. It is not a problem on Lion, just ML.

After a day or two of trial and error I have devised a plan to remove the ML install from your "corrupted" (yeah right) HDD and allow you to boot into SL or Lion (either or),

You will need the following:

1. Another Mac or an external Hard drive large enough to support OS X
   • If you use another macintosh, you will need to connect your two macs to eachother (via firewire or thunderbolt)
   • If you have an external HDD, you will need a copy of Mac OS X Snow Leopard or later-whichever you perfer
2. A copy of Diskwarrior
3. About 1 1/2 hours of free time

If you are using another mac to fix your drive! Connect your two macs via firewire (preferrably), then boot your "broken" mac, and hold the T Key, then proceed to step one for more instructions

If you use an external HDD, I reccomend it be at least 40 GB, make a quick install of only the nessesary files to boot, so please get rid of printer drivers, fonts, etc, this installation is only used to open diskwarrior

Steps:

1. Boot from another installation of OS X and Install Diskwarrior
2. Check in your computer folder to see if your OS X Drive you are trying to fix has been mounted, if the drive has indeed mounted skip to step 6
3. Open Disk Utility and attempt to mount your drive, if it is sucsessful skip to step 6
4. If mounting your fails, then repair your disk using first aid
5. After about 10-20 minutes the repair will fail and force mount your drive, when the message saying it has failed appears QUIT DISK UTILITY!!!
6. Open Diskwarrior and Select your hard drive
7. Rebuild your Hard Drive and confirm all changes
8. Open system prefrences and select the hard drive you just repaired as the startup disk
9. Reboot
10. Once rebooted open disk utility and repair permissions

This plan works 100% For me, tell me if it works for you?

I think the fact that apple refuses to take responsiblity for their broken installer is horrible, what makes it worse is that there is no easy way to go back to your previous installation once you begin the intall procedure

Unless you know someone with diskwarrior laying around, it will set you back $99, luckily for me I have a friend who owns it. 😀

After this experience I think Apple should seriously take reponsibility for their customers instead of leaving them to solve the problem they had created. Apple really needs to shape up because if they don't they are about to lose a loyal customer.

I will be staying on Snow Leopard until there is a good enough reason for me to upgrade, if you wish to upgrade I suggest using an external USB drive instead of apples Broken installer.

Plz reply and tell me if this solution works for you ^_^

The same thing with me but WD drives, Lion and Mountain Lion ruined 3 WD drives (2 beyond repair). Got some Seagates and all is well, touch wood.

Same problem as everyone else: Everything was going just fine and then.....same issue.

7 months later, NOT ONE APPLE REP here to say a word.

So it bares the question: Dafud are these forums for?

luisfrompasadena wrote:

Same problem as everyone else: Everything was going just fine and then.....same issue.

7 months later, NOT ONE APPLE REP here to say a word.

This is an Apple users forum.

So it bares the question: Dafud are these forums for?

What is a dafud, why is it bare?

Mountain Lion did not damage your hard disk. If you need help, ask.

What is a dafud, why is it bare?

Mountain Lion did not damage your hard disk. If you need help, ask.

It's tempting to poke fun at the grammar and all, but this is a very serious issue. I have an open bug report with Apple on this, and it's still "under investigation". It certain appears that Mountain Lion does damage firewire hard disks under certain as yet unknown conditions, whereas Lion does not. Those unknown conditions may (or may not) include booting from an SSD under ML and/or having multiple firewire drives on a daisy chain.

You have absolutely no basis to say that ML "did not damage" his hard disk. There is a very real possibility that it did. Thus your response is not only unhelpful, it's irresponsible.

If his issue resembles mine, it has to do with some kind of misidentification by fsck which, once run on a disk, flags it as unreadable erroneously, in the process rendering it inoperable. In my case, Disk Warrior always successfully rebuilds the disk. But the problem soon recurs.

Loren Ryter wrote:

What is a dafud, why is it bare?

Mountain Lion did not damage your hard disk. If you need help, ask.

It's tempting to poke fun at the grammar and all, but this is a very serious issue.

Not poking fun, why don't you explain what a dafud is for me, I have no idea.