It's Maverick alright....

Hello guys,
I've not been around for a while due to work commitments and enforced use of a PC machine. That said I wouldn't be able to access the forum if it wasn't for this one!

At home I run a mid 2010 27" iMac with a 1Tb ext HD TM back up and the last time I looked my Macintosh HD was using approximately 266GB of it's 1Tb capacity.

So I think this Mavericks looks interesting and given that I'm running 10.8.5 without any issues I think I'll give it a go. Disaster....."Install Failed" due to HD error. Grey screen, yellow warning triangles etc etc

I've been stuck in some sort of Install loop ever since and have just tried to repair the Macintosh HD drive by pressing Command R and using Disk Utility to repair the disk. No joy...it's telling me it can't repair it and that I need to back up as many files as possible, reformat the disk and then restore the backed up files.

Can anybody help with a step by step solution please ?

Sorry to hear of you problem. First it would be worth while checking here Apple - Support - iMac 1TB Seagate Hard Drive Replacement Program by entering your iMac's S/N to see your hard drive was one of those effected. If it is, it would explain the failure. Apple are still covering the replacement of effected hard drives up to 3 years from the original DOP.

When I've seen this before it can simply indicate the hard drive has corrupted, and disk utility isn't capable of repairing it. The drive can corrupt for various reasons, due to hardware issues, sometimes by writing to areas of the disk not used before containing media errors or due to the intense disk activity during an upgrade.

Quite often disk warrior, a third party commercial utility, will make a satisfactory repair. If you purchase it and it does, issue resolved. Other times disk warrior will report a hardware failure, indicating the hard drive requires replacing.

As you have a time machine backup, you could simply initialise the HD and restore, and hope that resolves the problem. If you did, and there were issues created by the disk error, these could effect the reliability of the time machine restore. You would then go back in time to find a good restore. This can cause you to lose recent data. I believe in a belt and braces approach, as a safeguard I would obtain another external hard drive ASAP and manually copy the user folder.

Let us know how you get on.

Hello techiesteve and many thanks for your reply.

I'll check the serial number later although I'm almost certain that it's a WD drive and not Seagate.

It's very interesting to see how these problems develop..I've always assumed that my system was pretty much A1. The TM issue worries me somewhat. I remember many threads ago whilst researching TM it appeared that Disk Utility is incompatible with a TM external drive and that you really had no way of knowing as to whether your back up was stable.

I'm assuming that it's the main HD disk that I will be erasing and not the 'Macintosh HD' partition (which was showing as unmounted just before I shut the machine down)? Also how do I access my user folder given that my desktop is severely limited under these circumstances.

Thanks for your help...my brain's not fully Mac ready just yet!

Just updating. I checked the serial number and the HD is not Seagate so I'm off today to purchase another external HD. Any clues as to how I can access my user/home folder to drag the files across?

Hello chap, not seen you in these parts for a while.

Looked over your posts. Can't see where you're having TM issues? The TM backup hasn't been touched at this point has it? It's 'just' the mavericks install that's failed?

Is it that you don't have any confidence in the TM backup?

Hello mate, I hope that you are well.

I've not been at home much in the last 8 months, been living out of a suitcase mainly in Scotland with the job and a W7 laptop.

I guess you've nailed it. I've never had such a failure before and never restored anything from TM. Just got visions of all my stuff disappearing down the plughole.

What are your thoughts?

My biggest concern would be if your internal disk has genuine issues and needed replacement.

But as far as the recovery of your data goes, you could do with a bootable copy of OSX to boot from.

I have one you could use. Sent you a PM

At work I see a small percentage of TM restores fail, usually due to TM backing when a hard drive was starting to fail. Then when you pick an older date, that may work, other times you have to go back further to get a good restore. Then you potentially lose the more up to date data. If your drive is simply corrupted due to the Mavericks upgrade, restoring to the last backup prior to upgrading will fix your problem. If it was me, I would prefer 'just incase' security by saving your user data first, otherwise all your recent work will rely on TM to recover. Simply connect an external HD, and drives are cheap these days, and initialise via your Snow Leopard install DVD if supplied, or the recovery partition/internet recovery if shipped with Lion, then install an OS. Then boot from this drive to pull off your user folder. If in copying the data it halts due to an error, see where the copy failed, miss out that file and continue.

techiesteve said:

Simply connect an external HD, and drives are cheap these days, and initialise via your Snow Leopard install DVD if supplied, or the recovery partition/internet recovery if shipped with Lion, then install an OS. Then boot from this drive to pull off your user folder. If in copying the data it halts due to an error, see where the copy failed, miss out that file and continue.

Click to expand...

Thank you for the detail Steve. Now I'm looking at this 2 ways (with mrplow's help as well), just a question if I was going to use an external HD as a boot disk I would need to initialise it as GUID Partition. Will I be ok with the one partition or would that be a nonsense if I wanted to manipulate files from the iMac onto it.

I've done mine by partitioning a 120gb external into 2. Just format as Mac journaled.

Connect that and a lion, mountain lion or mavericks install usb to your mac (I used Mountain Lion). Reboot holding option, select the OSX installer and point it at the first partition of the external. Let it install. Done.
You now have a working OSX install that you can boot into.

Hello again Gents,

I'm happy to report that my Mac is up and running again albeit with a couple of issues along the way.

I managed to download ML from the app store onto the external USB drive and went from there by copying files over etc.I then erased the internal HD and downloaded ML again onto that.

I tried a TM restore from the 1Tb external drive and it just wouldn't have it for some reason ( I recall a message about not being able to choose that drive for TM so it never even got started!).

So I then took a flyer and attempted the Mavericks upgrade again and it worked fine. I've just let things settle down for a couple of days with no problem and have now copied over my files from the external USB drive.
I've also erased the drive with the TM back up on and started again with a new first back up.

My main issues have been with loss of apps and emails (iPhoto,Pages,Numbers etc. which I've had to buy again) and the photo import took forever and seemed to duplicate each one with a small size grainy copy of it. Music..?, well if it's not an iTunes purchase I'll have to start again slotting CD's in.

The positives are that my system got a complete overhaul ,the disk error wasn't irreparable and I will now have a belt and braces approach to back-ups and boot drives.

Thank you once again for all your help and mrplow I'll PM you about that drive

You shouldn't of had to buy the iLife and iWorks stuff again.

mrplow said:

You shouldn't of had to buy the iLife and iWorks stuff again.

Click to expand...

Well, I figured that..I had the disks but I hit a warning during the original install that iPhoto was not compatible so I just invested in new up to date apps which I could download easily from the App store in case of a similar event.

Fair enough.

I guess now you know exactly where you're at and what's where etc. So you have a solid base to return to should you need to in the future