After yesterday’s Apple event, I have to admit that I was super excited about the announcement that the OS X Mavericks update was ready for Mac users to upgrade. Plus I loved the price tag of free. And I thought it was great how many older Macs would be able to update to Mavericks. I was ready to upgrade. Luckily for me, my husband went first and I am being spared the problems he is experiencing as I happily use Mountain Lion.
When my husband went to install the Mavericks update, he got a disk error message. A short search of Twitter shows he is not the only one. Some users got lucky and a second attempt to install resolved their problem.
I upgraded to OS X Mavericks and initially got a "this disk is damaged beyond repair" message. I said "Try that again" and it worked. whew.
— Tom Merritt (@acedtect) October 22, 2013
Others were not nearly so lucky.
First attempt at Mavericks install gave scary disk damaged error, had to repair volume from recovery, seems to be proceeding again now.
— Joe Cise (@joecise) October 23, 2013
@MatthewKnell yeah, it wouldn’t update on my MacBook Pro — gave me a “damaged disk” error in the middle of install. Trying to restore.
— Auntie Smell (@melliesmel) October 22, 2013
My husband was even less lucky. When he tried to do a repair, he received a message that the repair could not be made. And at that point, the disk seemed to have more problems than before. The issues are not yet resolved. I want to try and save you the same heartache.
What I really recommend you do is check out the Get Your Mac Ready for Mavericks article at Macworld from Dan Frakes and follow his instructions. It will be well worth your time. But if you are looking at that article and thinking that it’s not worth it, then there are two things you need to do, make a backup of the contents of your Mac.
Make a Backup of the Contents of your Mac
So, you have a Time Machine backup of your Mac? You backup all your important files daily? These are both great situations. Make sure those backups are valid before you start the install. My husband had a backup too. After the failure, we found it wasn’t valid. If you don’t have a backup, go get a portable USB hard drive and backup all your important files. You don’t want to have problems with your install and then find you’ve lost all the pictures of your child’s first birthday.
Create a Bootable USB to Install OS X
TechRepubic has a great article by Jesus Vigo on creating the Bootable USB. You will need either a large USB thumb drive (larger than 16 GB) or a USB hard drive. This is how you will get back on your Mac if all else fails. Have this backup ready. That’s how my husband actually got back on to his Mac and was able to recover his data. This is an absolute must have before you begin installing Mavericks.
Personally, I am going to wait a few days to install Mavericks. I am sure there will be an update shortly to help ensure this doesn’t continue to happen to users. And even so, I will not do anything until I get all my files backed up. (Needless to say, I already have a Bootable USB drive.)
I am still anxious to begin playing with Mavericks. But I plan to be prepared should the worst happen. I want you to be prepared too.
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