Hard Disk Damaged during Mavericks Installation

backup important data from same.

Very often failing hard drives CAN BE formatted and data reinstalled and work ok for several days..., Ive seen some work 'fine' for nearly a couple weeks.

The claim that the "hard drive isnt damaged in the first place" is a speculation.

All those who are experienced with hard drive use will inform people that failing hard drives post increasing error rates until theyre bricked (i.e. useless).

Its a common misconception that most or all hard drives "just fail or are fine"

MOST in fact have increasing failure rates,.....like onset symptoms of a deadly disease.

Instant mortality of a hard drive (where no symptoms manifested first) is actually rare.

**Your information still indicates a failing hard drive.

Of types of hard drive failures (or failing) listed below, only SOME manifest as instant mortality or "death" of a hard drive,......the rest reap a 'slow' but increasing failure.

• Head crash: a head may contact the rotating platter due to mechanical shock or other reason. At best this will cause irreversible damage and data loss where contact was made. In the worst case the debris scraped off the damaged area may contaminate all heads and platters, and destroy all data on all platters. If damage is initially only partial, continued rotation of the drive may extend the damage until it is total.
• Bad sectors: some magnetic sectors may become faulty without rendering the whole drive unusable. This may be a limited occurrence or a sign of imminent failure.
• Stiction: after a time the head may not "take off" when started up as it tends to stick to the platter, a phenomenon known as stiction. This is usually due to unsuitable lubrication properties of the platter surface, a design or manufacturing defect rather than wear. This occasionally happened with some designs until the early 1990s.
• Circuit failure: components of the electronic circuitry may fail making the drive inoperable.
• Bearing and motor failure: electric motors may fail or burn out, and bearings may wear enough to prevent proper operation.
• Miscellaneous mechanical failures: parts, particularly moving parts, of any mechanism can break or fail, preventing normal operation, with possible further damage caused by fragments.

😊

Here's the thing, you didn't experience the bug so you don't know anything.

The Apple support staff that I was in contact with told me quite frankly that there is very probably nothing wrong with the drive physically. The Mavericks installation did the right thing by not allowing us to proceed until the issue was cleared up... but here's the problem: IT DIDN'T LET YOU BOOT BACK TO THE DESKTOP AND RESOLVE THE ISSUE!

This isn't a question on whether the drive was bad or not, the issue is that the Mavericks install process locked you out from accessing anything.

OK, so I think I can shed a little light on this, Im a computer forensics guy so no speculation but sadly, few answers.

I updated my Mac Book Pro 2013 to Mavericks fine, no dramas.

Came to update my 2009 Mac Pro, 8 core, 16 gig RAM and as others have described, at the end of the install the computer reboots, throws a bunch of Unix'y type errors and dies. I tried to boot to a boot disk and reinstall Snow Leopard (newest disk I had) and it says that the disk cannot be installed to. I took a look at the disk and essentially the Master Boot Record is fried! I can understand why the genius chap earlier in this thread thought the disk was dead - so did I. I reasoned like others here that the heavy disk thrash installing a new OS on a 4 year old drive finished it off.

I popped a brand new 1TB disk in, installed Snow Leopard fine, downloaded and installed the 10.8 combined update, installed Mountain Lion, recovered all my data from my Time Machine - downloaded and installed Mavericks and...............fried!! Same issue, same errors, on a brand new Seagate disk. The issue is NOT the disk.

I've now gone right back through the process again but this time used Disk Util on the boot disk to repartition the replacement drive and do the installs up to Mountain Lion. No way Im trying Mavericks again until Apple give some type of explanation?

The disk isnt dead but you will need to repartition to use it again.

Hope that helps a bit?

After running the excellent DiskWarrior until no more disk or permission errors could be found, Mavericks seemed to have installed fine, BUT it just hung at startup and there was NOTHING in the logs... 😮

After installing Mavericks to an external drive, importing all my settings etc from my old drive, it hung as well!

After installing Mavericks on another external drive, NOT importing my old settings etc, it WORKED. Hm... 😕?

After comparing and comparing these installation for several hours, moving/copying files from the working to the not-working Mavericks, at last I found one very annoying settings file, /etc/launchd.conf, which contained: "setenv DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES /System/Library/Extensions/Asepsis.kext/Contents/Resources/libAsepsis.dylib".

The Mavericks setup had apparently moved Asepsis to the folder /Incompatible Software, but it had NOT removed the reference in launchd.conf. It would have been very nice if the OS at least could have put a hint in the logs to why it just hang... 😉

After removing/clearing the launchd.conf file, Mavericks finally STARTED TO WORK FINE!! 🙂

I hope this can help someone else!

I just joined your club. I didn't want to join your club. No offense.

My Mac Mini is dead in the water after I tried upgrading to Mavericks. Same "Damaged HD" message. So it works perfectly with Mountain Lion, and all the sudden my drive is damaged. Hard. To. Believe.

Maverick is badly coded. Period.

I disagree, I have attempted to install os x mavericks twice now and both times my hard drive has crashed. I have backed up all of my data. Currently I am runnny on mountain lion and am having no issues.

Hi all,

I just want to share my solution.

If you guys are trying to repair the disk, mount, unmount or you are stuck in an endless installation boot, just restart your mac, press cmd+r to access to the recovery partition, choose reinstall OS X, login with your apple id and then, when the file downloading starts, abort the installation.

This will release the previous maverick partition and you will be able to access to your hard drive again.

I hope it helps someone

I am so over the "know it all's" on these forums.. Especially the ones who don't contribute positively..

Now let me tell you why I didn't do a back up before installing a new OS.. Because I didn't know I had to.

Not everyone is within the same skill level which is why there are forums, instead there are people like you who want to show off.. Why don't you try to be supportive instead of throw it in the faces of others? I am in the same predicament, and guess what, my computer told me to do an update for crying out loud so I did... I will make sure I look to the other helpful people on this forum and ignore the pathetic minds of those who's only authority and confidence is in cyberspace because in the real world you would cower at confrontation..

Same here. Reverting back to Mountain Lion was the best solution for me.

Learn from what gwforeman ? Learn NOT to ever download Mavericks again or learn to have another machine ? Whats the chances of me ever downloading MAVERICKS again on this machine ? I dont need to, its done now .

How many times must I say this to people like gwforeman - "MY SYSTEM WAS BACKED UP" and I couldnt persoanlly give a toss for your 2 cents and wonder how you got any helfulness votes at all if thats the attitude you take with people . Why even bother posting if its only to gloat ?

gwforeman - you are rude and unhelful and you are speaking to someone who put the first computer dealing system at the London Stock Exchange 25 years ago when you were probably an embryo, I can write and programme in several archaic computer languages not just Windows so quit with the rudeness - just cause you work in "IT" does not give a right to be so rude and its not "TOUGH LOVE" - you dont even know me so your version of "Tough Love" is irelevent and unwanted as was your so called "help" . Its not help as we know it , its called being smug in the UK .

Its people like you that put me off using Apple Forums - just so you know .

Mavericks caused my hard drive to crash out - maybe it was the effort of downloading it that finally killed it - all I know is that it was fine before I downloaded it and then it died - that's not an open invitation for all the nasty , snarky , unhelpful "I TOLD YOU SO " comments that have appeared on here because MY DATA WAS BACKED UP THREE WAYS !!! Did not one of you making the snarky comments actually read that bit ? It was the inconvenience and repair timescale that was the issue and the "why" when the reason for buying a MAC over a PC was its reliability factor ? Then I discover that the HD mortality rates in MACS are the same in a PC so why did I bother ?

My advice to everyone is if your hard drive gets to a certain age ( three years max) and it does a lot of work, back it up, replace it with a more modern SSHD and use your Time Capsule and Airport to make granular and screen shot back ups before you attempt to upgrade to MAVERICKS OS .

And to the gloating , rude and unhelpful people out there - why bother with us "idiots" , why not just shoot us and have done with it eh ?

I had the same issue when installing Maverick on my MacBook. The installation stopped, reporting that the hard-disk had become unusable. I tried all the options provied by the program, including restoring from the TimeMachine which was updated just before the upgrade, but all failed with the disk seemingly unusable. Thanks to this forum I managed to "repair" the disk with the disk utility, despite this option being greyed out initially. "Verifying" the disk had produced a long list of red issues. I must admit I first thought that the hard-drive had developed a physical problem. After the repair operation and veryifying again that all disk errors had been corrected, I rebooted the machine and the Maverick installation competed to conclusion without further incident. I guess that the casual user would need to take their machine to Apple for help. I have heard that others have erased their hard-drive and started again, spending days to recover. I managed to avoid this course of action, although I came close. So thanks again for those that provided helpful suggestions on this forum. It only took me about 3 hours longer than the usual time (installation on two iMacs was faultless).

Like many on this thread I too experienced disk corruption when upgrading to Mavericks. This is a Mavericks issue not a user issue. Period. Repeated attempts with the utility allowed me to "repair" the disk. Then with a little more luck, I was prevented from continuing with the install of Mavericks becaue my disk was "locked". As I felt my luck running out, I tried restarting from the original disk and I have my beautiful and working old OS back.

For the comment about exposing the inevitable demise of the disk with the upgrade, I know I am going to die some day but I don't need someone to kill me today to prove the point. And for all of you rude techies, go back into your basements and go play video games. Stop talking to real people. You have clearly demonstrated you are incapable of it.

Like IronUke I had the dreaded HD problem. On an iMac early 2008 (MBP upgraded without glitch)

This is what I did thanks to this thread. Slight differences.

1. Had to reboot the machine as it was stuck. Cmd r while reboot

2. Went into Disk util. Verified and repaired the disk and partitions

3. I had to repair the disk 4 times before I got a clean bill. (until the 4th time it said that I had to re-format HD)

4. Continued re-install process.

Without this thread I would have been lost.

Thanks Zardock and all real contributors.

Thank you so much for posting this solution!! 🙂

I went to the mac-store and their help didn´t work at all. After doing some research I found that I probably had the same problem with the SSD being blocked - so the "repair"-button in disk utility never "un-grayed".

Luckily I also had a friend that had DiskWarrior on her computer so she gave it to me on an USB-stick. Just plugged the stick in, followed your help, rebooted the mac and YES it worked!!! 😀 I got back to my Snow Leopard and all my files were untouched. Such an easy fix and it only took about 15 minutes!!

I must also add that I really don´t know much about computers, but with the help from some wonderful people here I managed to sort the problem.

So a big THANKS to you for your help! (Especially JDW1 😀)

Could you please help me? I'm in this situation.right now after some efforts I suddenly have the ability to repair disk in disk utility. I did repair permissions. Now I'm doing repair disk.