Problem updating MacBook Air - error

Reinstalling Lion/Mountain Lion Without Erasing the Drive

Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.

Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion: Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion and click on the Continue button.

Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it is three times faster than wireless.

Your data are unaffected and none of it will be deleted.

Why don't you get this issue taken care of before you worry about installing Mountain Lion. What I can tell you is that upgrading a dysfunctional system only leads to a more dysfunctional system.

Possible causes:

1. The hard drive needs to be re-partitioned and re-formatted.
2. The hard drive is failing.
3. There is some other hardware failure.
4. The installer application is corrupted (re-download.)

I did not have a Thunderbolt Software Update in my list of updates. I unchecked all the updates except the Mac OSX 10.7.5 Update, allowed it to complete, and was then able to install all of the other updates after the machine reboot. Thanks for the tip on the OS Update. That got me going in the right direction.

I know this is an old thread, but I had same error when upgrade to Mavericks. I tried all possible solution in many other thread with no single luck.

Thanks for your solution, Greplo. it works very well and solves the problem. I enabled only the OS update, after done successfully, then followed to update the rest.