Q: When installing Yosemite, received error "File system verify or repair failed"

I had the same issue and fixed it!!

First of all I had precious files and disabled time machine a long time ago to reserve resources. So I didn't want to lose any files.

Here's what I did:

1. Downloaded Disk Warrior 4.4 (from another pc)

2. Put Diskwarrior onto a USB stick

3. Turned on macbook pro and once error popped up I went into Utilities (top bar)

4. Selected Disk Utility

5. Inserted the USB stick with Disk Warrior on it

6. clicked on burn and inserted blank DVD-R

7. Selected Diswarrior.cdr

8. Write onto disk... wait wait...

9. Done, restart and hold down C

10. Mac will boot from DVD disk takes a while for Disk Warrior to load so be patient!

11. Once Diskwarrior has started - select rebuild (this will rebuild your directory)

12. Then once that's done do the file check and then hardware too

Then I restarted and BANG! Yosemite started installed and im all sorted now!!

Hi guys!

After fixed the same issue for me last week, I came back to see if anyone else had the same problem. And looks like you do! Well this is just unresponsible from Apple I mean, what the ****? I almost lost all my data because of mistakes in updating procedure. If my disk was having errors, why on earth didn't Yosemite checked that BEFORE updating my comp?! No, after mounting an installing image and screwing up a MBR saying: "Well Sir, looks like we have a problem here! Let's make some restarting phun, won't we?"

Ok, joke aside, here's my solution for MBP 13" 2013:

1. Holding an option key, I was able to select to boot into an old disk and came into Mavericks version of Disk utility

2. I made a Image restore of Macintosh HD to external drive I had to bought

3. Then I boot into Yosemite Disk Utility and reformat Macintosh HD with deleting partition

4. Checked the disk has no errors.

5. Restared and CONTIUE with Yosemite instalation to empty drive

6. With external drive with backuped Image instalation restored also my data.

Sorry for extremly bad english. hope this would be useful for you. It requires just an external disk, or, if you already have backups on Time machine, just repartion your SSD and continue instalation you already downloaded and having mounted. After, restore your data.

Cheers.

Sophia,

I am not sure if you are saying you did or did not install Maverick or Yosemite?

Assuming you never. Once your disk has been wiped and you boot into recovery mode, you should be able to download a version of OS X (doesn't matter what version). Once you have downloaded an OS X version (i.e. mine was Mountain Lion) and have your mac back up and running, you can sign into the App store and go to purchases tor download Mavericks or choose to upgrade to Yosemite. I personally went with Mavericks. Once Mavericks was back up and running I then used time machine to retrieve my back-up data.

i had the same problem. Tried all the disk and permissions  repairs. Nothing worked. I did an Apple Hardware Test and found out I had some bad memory. I removed the bad memory and all my problems went away. Hope this saves someone some grief.

Disk Warrior 4 costs $99 dollars very expensive solution.

I try to reinstall mavericks and I can't because I got the error: The content from this drive could not be modified.

It looks that Yosemite locks the drive and you can't do nothing, big error from Apple OS team.

I try to delete the installation partition and while trying I delete the main partition, after that I could reinstall mavericks and now I am recovering all the data with Data Rescue 4, also a very expensive solution ( $99 ) to this issue, I try to use Data Recovery Druid and the main memory of my machine can't handle all the files, that is why I choose Data Rescue 4.

I recommend you that if you have to delete your hard drive, don't use it and use Data Rescue 4 to recover all your files.

Same problem.

It worked using the provided link. Except that it did not repair after restarting with cmd+s, but using the Terminal.

Thank you so much!

http://african-heart.blogspot.com/2010/07/fixing-invalid-node-structure-in-mac.h tml?showComment=1365269696276#c4328371437324677074

FIXED.

The reason this happens is because you didn't keep your updates to date in Mavericks. You need to have the latest version of Mavericks installed in order to successfully update to Yosemite. Only way to fix it is to back all your data on an external drive and wipe out your hard drive. Geek Squad does it for about $120 and they backed everything up on a 500GB Hard Drive. All my pictures were still in iPhoto, and all my data was still there. Hope I helped.

so how can i fix the issues on my HD?, what you said makes so much sense. do i need to reformat my macbook?

Disk Utility in the 10.10 installer is flaky and buggy.

I received this error on a late 2009 MBP when I was trying to do a clean install. I booted off USB installer and then opened Disk Utility and erased the drive.  Then every install would fail saying the drive failed verify, but this if course is nonsense because it was newly formatted.

Then I attempted to restore a backup image I'd made of the old snow leopard hard drive.  Disk Utility from the installer screwed that up too, not allowing me to restore from the image. 

At that point I figured, what the ****, try the install one last time.  It worked! 

Some testing revealed that all I had to do was have an External hard drive connected over USB.  In my case this drive was holding my backup image, but I didn't use that drive for the installer OR for the destination volume.  But having an external drive with a Mac OS filesystem on it plugged in might solve the problem for you and get it installed.. it did for me.

Hopefully apple fixes the bugs in the installer's bundled disk utility when it comes to older machines, rather than expect people to work around this problem and then update the OS past 10.0.0 in the app store.

ITS THE MEMORY!  If you've updated RAM at all take it out and go back to your original config!  IT Worked!!

Hello TURANSU, i need your help

How did you reboot on mavericks when quit the Yosemite updater? I need to do that so i can back up.

Please respond.

Thank you!

Go to disk utilities of yosemite,erase the issued hard drive to mac os extended journal and booom woola it will work,i had same issue right now it installing after these steps

I was attempting a clean install, and even after erasing the entire hard drive, still kept getting this error.  I even tried formatting the partition in FAT32 to erase any evidence of a previous installation, still no joy.

What finally worked was changing the partition layout, for example splitting the 500MB drive in to two 250MB partitions.  Install on partition #2, and boom it went through no problem.  I've got Yosemite re-installed after 3 weeks of effort (Internet Recovery doesn't work on the 2010 Macbook pros, which was an entirely separate issue)

I been dealing with this issue all day on a customers computer.

This is the only way around this that I Found, I recommend trying to backup your files first to an external drive if you can.

do an internet recovery, power up system to while holding "command and R"

when the options come up, select Disk utility

Verify Permissions

Verify Disk

Repair Permissions

Repair Disk

Restart your Mac

Then it should start installing/upgrading to whichever OSX you were trying to install.

Hope this helps, if it works please reply and let me know, it worked for me.