Mavericks Install Failed?

Lisa, same thing happened to me, I went to disk utility and did repair disk, then tried again.. worked fine but took overnight to restore from time capsule

I finally recovered..

Summary:

Tried installing Mavericks (FREE is good.. who said that ?).

Installation failed. Tried all the tricks mentioned in this thread. Repair failed all the time, drive not available.

Thanks to the lessons learned from old days of Windows XP, I had created 2 partitions on my new SSD when I installed it last year. My old HDD that came for MBP was stil sitting in that very same SSD box.

Connected old HDD to boot into Snow Leapord. Tried to run Disk Utility, on the Macintosh HD partition, although it failed again, but this time it gave a message that the volume has been mount but for Read only. Thats what I needed. Quickly connected another USB external, copied the Parrell VM (work Win7) that I needed from that partition, along with documents, desktop and music folders. Data in the second partition was still intact.

Spend few more hours to get this partitiion back to resume Mav installation or even put ML back, but gave up at around 4 in the morning, and deleted the partition, built a bootable USB Stick for Maverick installation few hrs later, back with all the latest OSX with all data back in its place.

FREE not so good; killed about 16 hrs or work productivity.

Found this on CNET;

Hard disk errors found

A second issue may occur when the OS X installer finds fault with your hard drive and will not install. In these cases you can usually clear the problem by rebooting to the OS X recovery partition by holding Command-R immediately after hearing the boot chime at startup. Once the recovery partition has loaded, you can open Disk Utility and use it to run a disk repair routine on your main boot drive. After any found errors have been fixed, you can then reboot normally and try the installation again.

I have been trying the Command R thingy.

I still go to OS X Mavericks installation interface but I can repair Macintosh HD (before 'Repair' is greyed out), repaired but the repair process wasn't successful.

What if I have never backed up at all? Is it safe to restore using TIme Capsule?

What can we do?

Take out the HDD, out in casing, clone the HDD, then erase the original HDD during the Mavericks set up?

Oh my! Why should we do all this and go through all this trouble just to update the OS?

😟

Hi, guys,

I have a question.

Is it still Command R if I am on still on Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and not in MountainLion?

I don't think Command R is working for me.

😟

Don't forget to try resetting your PRAM. I encountered all the problems and error messages mentioned above, tried all the recommended solutions, and nothing worked. Then I reset PRAM and Mavericks booted up without a problem. Didn't have to restore from a back up.

I tried resetting the PRAM but it still not works. So finally still need to restore.

I've done this exact same thing and it allows me to at least get out of the installer loop I was in. My question now is how should I go about backing up my data? Disk utility still says that it can't repair my internal HD disk and the computer just turns itself off when I try to reboot from the internal disk. While running Mavericks from the external HD, I can see the internal HD in the finder window and it still has all of my data. It also has a new folder labeled something along the lines of "Corrupted Files" (I'm at work so I don't have the computer in front of me), of which there are 2. And it won't let me just delete those files. I guess my question is, if I am running Mavericks from my external HD, can I get Time Machine to backup the internal HD without copying the corrupted files, reformat the HD and then try a clean install of Mavericks on to it while using the "Restore from Time Machine backup" option during the insall (assuming I can get to that point)?

Wordsmith01 wrote:

I had the exact same problem. I ended up installing Mavericks on an External HD when I was given the option in the setup process ( just a 1TB Western Digital Hard Drive) From that External HD I allowed Mavericks to boot up all the way, answering all the setup questions as if I had just bought a new computer. Once that was all done, I accessed Preferences / Start Up Disc.....and chose to reboot from my Mac's Internal HD (until this point, during the setup process, the internal HD had been inaccessible). My Mac then booted up just as it always has with Mountain Lion and all of my files and settings were untouched.

I'm experiencing all of the same problems - including not being able to repair the disk or boot up in safe mode (the computer just shuts down when the progress bar is in the middle). I have 2 questions:

1) Can Darryl or anyone else expand on the following:

"I tried backing up my mac while in safe mode, (hold down SHIFT after chime and wait till a spinning cog/ wheel appears) took 5+hours and still didn't finish so i canceled it. (as it was hanging up on "indexing backup)

I manually dragged and dropped all my data from desktop, documents, music etc... onto my External HDD"

^^How exactly is this accomplished? Since I can't boot into safe mode and backup my files there, how can I "manually drag and drop" like Darryl said? What screen is this at specifically?

2) Is a utility like Disk Warrior an option? Would I be able to boot from a Disk Warrior disc and have it do its thing? If not can I use a simiar program?

I have already accepted that I need to completely wipe and reinstall the OS, however I would really like to salvage some important files before I do so. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

I agree. Too many people reporting the exact same error when upgrading to Mavericks.

FWIW, I attempted 2 installs on different Macs. The first one was on my personal MacBook Pro Retina running Mountain Lion. It went without a hitch. Took about an hour. I already have a TIme Capsule at home and my machine was fully backed up, so I wasn't concerned.

Then the next day I went to install on my company MacBook Pro (1 year older) running Mountain Lion. I use Time Capsule with this Mac too and made certain that a backup had completed. The key difference, in my opinion, is that the company Mac uses File Vault encryption. When I went to do the Mavericks upgrade on the company Mac it was a failure. Everything appeared to be working as expected, it rebooted and during the installation process it reported a hard drive failure and suggested to try again. I did. No go. I also did the recovery mode option and the disk utility did NOT find any errors. Tried that process a total of 4 times before I gave up and decided I would have to do a restore from my Time Machine and then revisit the topic of installing Mavericks. The restore operation is still erasing the hard drive (I guess it has to go through that process because of File Vault) and it has been over 18 hours now. Hopefully that part finishes soon and then the actual restore operation...

But I agree. How can it be that this many people are reporting hard drive failures during an OS upgrade?

Had this happen on my new i7 mini with a Fusion drive. I sensed that what I bumped into was going to be bad, so I took it back where I bought it. Long story short, the drive had to be wiped, Leopard was installed on it, Mavericks was installed over that, and now my data is being restored via TM. I get it back in the morning.

Is steve Ballmer running Apple now?

UPDATE: DiskWarrior SAVED MY LIFE! All I did was boot from a DiskWarrior DVD and it completely repaired the drive. I then restarted and went right back into the Mavericks installer where it installed perfectly. Those of you having the same problems - use DiskWarrior IMMEDIATELY!