If your Software Update alerts you to upgrade to OS X Mavericks… BEWARE!!!
I hit “upgrade & install” and now my Mac Laptop hard drive is all screwed up. I hit that RESTART button many, many times. But it just kept coming back to this same screen. Nothing else. No chance of escape. The Apple Store said they could repartition my hard drive, but that would erase everything on my computer! Everything!!! Not an option.
So instead my laptop is now with a specialist trying to do some “data recovery magic.” Expensive magic. So did the Mavericks upgrade break my computer?… who knows. The Apple Store Genius says no. The fact that it happened during the installation makes me think otherwise. So think twice before you upgrade to OS X Mavericks… and be sure to back-up everything on your computer now!!! I just learned a very valuable & expensive lesson.
Lesson #1 before upgrading your system. Do a full backup! (which I did) and then upgrade, (which I did). No problems. I can’t say it enough. Backup, Backup, Backup! And redundancy is even better! Two or three backups! That way you don’t lose everything!
One tb external drives are real cheap these days. I backup every few days at least.
The Apple store is lying to you. Mavericks has corrupted thousands of hard drives – it’s all over the internet while apple is trying to keep a lid on it. What makes it worse is that even if you had a backup, the disk damage makes it impossible to reinstall. I managed to save my hard drive and do a manual reinstall, which has taken every evening for the last ten days to complete. Believe me, I have better things to do with my time.
One thing they don’t tell you is when you restart, you should restart from your original OS disk that came with the laptop, and then you can sometimes get into the hard drive and drag out data. Restarting directly from a corrupted HD ain’t gonna happen. Also, if you were running Lion, you may be able to boot up from the web and do the same (but they don’t tell you that, either).
I don’t know what the percentage of users is that have had this problem, but out of my colleagues with macs it’s about 1 in 4, worse if you have a mac more than 3 years old.
Do not under any circumstances upgrade to Mavericks for at least another six months, when hopefully they will have fixed this.