Mountain Lion installation aborted due to problems in hard disk

[tedi]

Hi,

Today I download and started the installation of Mountain Lion on my Macbook which previously had Lion installed on it. During the installation I've got a message saying that the installation was not performed because there was an error in the hard disk that could not be repaired. Then the headache started:

1. Tried several times repairing the error with the Disk Utility from the ML installer without success.

2. Tried booting with the Lion repair partition and repair the volume with Disk Utility without any better result.

3. Tried starting with DiskWarrior but the volume is not shown for repair, although the hardware is displayed on the latest tab.

To this point Lion wouldn't boot anymore as it just went to the Mountain Lion installer directly and the volume would show unmount from time to time (randomly after rebooting) in Disk Utility.

4. Then I tried doing a PRAM reset and the ML installer does not appear again.

So the current status is that it always boots with the Lion repair partition (it does not give me the option to boot from the Lion system disk).

I'm about to remove the hard disk and put it in an external case to copy its contents, then put it again on the Macbook and reinstall Lion from the repair partition. But just wanted to double-check if anyone had better luck with that as I did a clean install and migrated lot of data two weeks ago :'(

Btw, I changed the original Macbook HD by a SSD one, which I'm starting to suspect could be the problem.

Any leads?

[trevor]

Someone else here reported problems installing Mountain Lion on a third party SSD, so I suspect that your suspicion is correct.

Trevor

[anthlover]

Stating the Obvious but asking if you backups. From your description it does not sound like you had a clean back up. Definitely get your data in order first before proceeding.

You might be best served using a bootable version of ML assuming the issue is not the 3rd party SSD.

You can make it from the ML download in your Aps folder of ML. Either use Carbon Copy Cloner or Disk Utility. CCC is a bit easier.

I have just updated 3 systems to ML. Two from Lion and 1 from Snow. 2 were straight HD. 1 was a Seagate Hybrid 500XT.

Good Luck.

[tedi]

I have a backup from few days ago but I don't wanna think that Apple is getting the Microsoft path of breaking/recovering stuff as a common operation.

At least some breath... I tried starting in safe mode and boots up the Lion disk. Unfortunately it doesn't let me mount hard disks or perform backups with Time Machine, but I'm happy to see the data there at the moment.

[tedi]

Just saw the OCZ forums ... it seems to be a general problem without any fix released yet

[anthlover]

Always back up disks can always fail, etc.

You do not need time machine for a restore. You need another drive for now perhaps your old regular HD. Install previous OS. Not sure migration assistant would work but it would be the quickest easiest fix. Other wise we can guide you in hand copying the data.

More soon as you progress