Hard Disk Damaged during Mavericks Installation

This happened to me yesterday. I finally decided to upgrade to Mavericks. I first did repair permissions in disk utilities before downloading mavericks. I have been having NO problems with my hard drive and my disk utilities said everything looked good. I then downloaded mavericks. When prompted I continued on to the process of installing mavericks. A couple of minutes into the install I received a message with a large triangle symbol that said the installation had failed and that Mylar d disk was corrupted or damaged and that I should try to do something with a back up or disk. The machine then automatically restarted. When it restarted a menu came up with four choices. I first tried disk utilities. Verify permissions was the only radio button that was not graded out in the disk first aid window of disk utilities. I verified permissions but nothing happened. I then tried another of the four choices by selecting install OSX. That ended up completely locking the computer. So I shutdown the computer with the power button. I waited briefly. I turned computer on with the power button, while holding command and r. I waited for the apple to appear. When the apple appeared I released command and r. It took a minute to come up. Then the menu with the four choices reappeared. The first choice on the menu was time machine. I don't use time machine. The second choice was install OSX, but I had learned that that locked the computer. The third choice was use Safari. So I used Safari. I read some of the information there, but didn't see the exact right answer. I went back into disk utilities. And voila! All of the radio buttons (verify and repair both permissions and the disk). (Did using Safari somehow unlock the computer). I clicked repair disk and waited for that to finish. I clicked verify disk and waited. I clicked repair permissions and waited for that to finish. I clicked verify permissions and waited for that to finish. All gave messages that the HD was working good and everything repaired. So clearly there is nothing wrong with the hard drive. I then restarted using the pull down menu under the Apple. When the computer restarted, the mavericks install window came right up and I was able to continue the install. Mavericks is now installed and working just fine. There IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONg WITH MY HARD DRIVE!

NEED YOUR HELP TOO,

Same problem but on two macs. When Mavericks came out, installed on my wife's two hand-me-down 2008 iMacs. She immediately had problems with iMac 1, she was trying to make photo books for. Christmas, so she used my newer iMac. We took her iMac 1 to Genius Bar and was told HD was fried. But I thought, OK, old Mac, I'll get anew cheap drive give old iMac to grand kids for web, etc,, BECAUSE WE HAD ANOTHER MAC WIFE COULD USE!

So, got tech support on phone to walk me through using the external Hd Time Machine B/U we had on her iMac 1 using Migration Assistant to 2008 iMac 2 and went through the Disk Utility startup to make sure no problems on iMac 2, and guess what? HD was fried too. At least according to tech support. I go to Genius Bar tomorrow for them to check out if truly DOA.

So it now appears I have 2 dead 2008 iMacs. I've read the treads but need some sort of Readers Digest Condensed version of what y'all think I should do. Shouldn't Apple be responsible for this?

And most important, I have all my wife's files, pictures on an external HD in Time Machine, even if I can clear both macs and go back to Snow Leopard or whatever, will the Time Machine backup reinstall Mavericks?

I FIGURED OUT HOW TO FIX THIS! Mavericks royally messed up my HD and I was freaking out because I didn't have a back-up. After much research online and going back and forth from different forums here is how to fix your "damaged" HD.

So basically to save your data (if your disk is cannot be repaired in Disk Utility or you can't access it or if you keep getting stuck in the loop), you have use an external hard drive as the start up disk and install Lion or Mavericks on that then transfer your files from the HD to the external. Then shut down the computer, remove the external (so it tries to boot up on its own), go into Recovery Mode then to Disk Utility and do a level 7 erase (it will be in your security options under erase. It's the Most Secure one that the US Department of Defense uses. This will take about 12 hours and once that is done, restart your computer in Recovery Mode then reinstall Lion. To transfer your data back on your computer, plug in the external and use it as a hard drive, your data will be under the User folder and whatever username you use. TAKE THAT APPLE.

Just to join in the fun....MBP bricked as I was installing Mavericks on 2009 MBP with a two year old 1GB hard drive. S.M.A.R.T drive error. Not under warranty, but called Apple Care. Maverick downloads get 90 days of support. 2nd Level tech person said "hard drive about to fail and you need to I replace it." Based on the number of posts and cries for help, it appears that there is something about the Maverick install that causes hard drive issues. RECOMMEND NOT INSTALLING MAVERICK!!!!! Stay with Mountain Lion and keep your machine running. (My Opinion)

There is no application like DiskWarrior created by Apple. Or no one would of written DiskWarrior. It is often recommended by other sites on repairing Mac hard drives also. Recommending it is helpful and unavoidable. Why are you filling threads with your redundant nonsense. You don't seem to of learned anything by owning 100's of HDs. Why have you owned 100s of HDs? Post of a photo of them here or on snapshots.com. If you have nothing useful but your fluffy bunny analogy to say, you are irrelevant. Also your quote about every OS X update causes claims of dead HDs, why don't you ever post links to your statements like the people you're contradicting do? And in spite of everyone saying that Mavericks made their HD unrespnsive or dead and eventually repairing it after many tries you dogmatically stick to your trist about software can't harm hardware. You are not saying anything helpful or backing up what you say. And reading your posts has proven to be a waste of time. Your Dogma can't run over intelligent peoples Karma.

Plotinus Veritas installing a new huge OS like Mavericks is not the same as adding a fluffy bunny .png .jpg or whatever file to your HD. Mavericks also put my 2012 Mac Tower in a coma. After a day of hard work I got ML back on and working. I won't try Mavericks again. If something works don't try and fix it. Also I have worked on Macs for 20 years and have only owned 7 HDs on 4 computers. Why would anyone need to of owned 100s of them? Please back up what you say. We were talking about internal HDs not external HDs like Lacies. Which I have had about 10 of, I usually toss them when they start spewing smoke.

PlotinusVeritas wrote:

JDW1

Nothing was wrong with it prior to the install,SOLUTION: DiskWarrior 4.4

Outside of your possible use of this board as a commercial for software,

.....nothing is ever wrong with any drive until something is wrong with it.

Specific data itself cannot mechanically kill a hard drive.......if a drive is "fated" to fail, it will fail on saving a picture of a fluffy bunny as soon as it will installing a new OS,.........its all just 10101010101 to a hard drive,

You quite obviously have zero experience with this issue, or what the Mavericks installer actually does when it installs. Its not just writing data to the drive. It changes the partition table. *THIS* is what causes the failures. And Disk Warrior is the *ONLY* utility available that can repair these types of issues. Telling people here to use it allows them to continue using their machines without losing data.

This issue occurred on my machine right after Mavericks shipped, repaired with disk warrior, still going strong with zero drive errors as of the other day when I scanned it.

So not sure what YOUR issue is, but stop telling people incorrect information based on something you have no experience with.

I tried usuing Diskwarrior to fix this issue but it still said "disk is damaged, cannot be repaired". The only thing that actually fixed my MBP is the solution I posted above. My MBP is running perfectly to this day (almost a month after the issue).

I had the same problem, got the same sub standard response from Apple. I tried all of the suggestions posted here. The only thing that worked for me was Diskwarrior. It worked for me with out doing anything else but run the Diskwarrior program. From the post here it looks like the Maverick install affected computers differently so what worked for me may not work for everybody. Scroll through the post and try the various methods and hopefully one will work. I would try the solutions that don't involve erasing the hard drive first. Of course there is no substitute for a back up, which I didn't not have (but do now). Apples response to this problem was horrible. It is obvious that the OS update cause the problem. The supervisor at Apple support admitted it. Apple should be advising people to at least try some of the methods discussed here instead of telling people that he only thing that could be done was to try to save files from the 'damaged' hard drive, then erase the hard drive and start over. After taking to the support supervisor and having no support on this issue I ended the conversation by saying to him congratulations Apple has just become Microsoft.

I would advise anyone "upgrading" to Mavericks. 1) Backup all your data first to another drive. 2) Erase your HD. 3) Install Mavericks. This is what I did after unsuccessfully trying to update from ML without erasing. And then having a nightmare of problems trying to figure out what went wrong. BTW I have many internal drives and lots of backups beforehand. Although I originally wanted to avoid a reinstall of all my non Apple applications. I didn't need to buy Diskwarrior as my data was safe and my programs are licensed and reloadable.

The reason why Apple acts the way it does on those support calls is because Apple has "not invented here" syndrome. They don't want to recommend Disk Warrior, despite the fact that it has for years been proven to solve all manner of mysterious problems, simply because Apple did not invented it nor does Apple own it. And that's why I personally believe that Apple would do well to acquire Alsoft and integrate Disk Warrior into Disk Utility, putting it on every single Mac they make. Problem solved.

And although the other commentor here suggests that the best way to the Mavericks update it is to make a back up and then erase everything on the hard drive, to me, that's the Long Road. And yes, I've been down that road before. It takes a lot of time to restore everything. It would be much faster just to have a copy of Disk Warrior, using it only if something bad happens.

Aways helpful.

I lost hard drives on two different iMacs the moment I installed Mavericks. I completely erased and resinstalled Mavericks on one of them, but it never worked right after that. I have a heck of a time getting it to start up and now I can't even start up in recovery or safe mode.

I was told the same thing by the "genius" at my local store. Buy a new hard drive and that there was no way the failure could have anything to do with Mavericks OS. Unbelievable.

I have had 6 (business) MBP and Air's have this issue. I worked with apple on 4 of them. I also had two corruptions (all SSD's by the way) about a week after the maverics upgrade.

I boot them verbose and they all give the following simmilary error:

** Checking extents overflow file.

** Checking catalog file.

Incorrect number of thread records

(4, 22948)

** Checking multi-linked files.

..

..

while repairing the volume.

I hope Apple can figure this out, as I am getting tired of this! 😟