MacBook Pro 9,2 reFIND Mavericks install failure

[Chris Pyle]

I had just installed two new harddrives in my macbook and I had just done a fresh install of OSX mavericks, I then installed reFIND. Restarted my MAC and I was unable to boot into OSX, it failed multiple times. Then I booted from USB, opened Disk Utility and reformatted the harddrive and tried to a do a fresh install, but now the install fails.

With 3-4 mins left, it says: Install failed, the installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail.

I believe I made two big mistakes. I downloaded the reFIND zip file, unzipped it directly into my Downloads directory and ran the install.sh directly from there. I thought the install.sh would run and place the reFIND software exactly where it needed to be. I'm guessing that was a huge mistake.

Secondly, I should've kept the original install and posted the readout, instead I repartitioned the harddrive and now I'm stuck.

My next step was to install Ubuntu and Crunchbang on separate partitions. Does anyone know how I can reset the bootloader from terminal when booting from the USB? As it stands now, i don't have a functional OS installed & I can only boot from USB and fail to do anything else.

Any help is appreciated.

[Roderick W. Smith]

If you repartitioned the disk, then it's very unlikely that the original install is causing the problems. Your symptoms, in fact, sound more like a hardware failure to me. I recommend you check your disk with a SMART tool to see if it's in the early stages of failure.

[Chris Pyle]

Is the SMART status from Disk Utility enough or do I need to download a SMART tool to a USB and attempt to run it while booting OSX from USB? Thanks for the help, I'm new to much of this.

** The SMART status in disk utility is "Verified"

I managed to find a command to show what the hard drive says about the GPT. I don't know if this is helpful except it says Suspicious MBR at sector 0?

[Roderick W. Smith]

I don't know what the "suspicious MBR" message means. It might simply be reacting to a hybrid MBR, which is technically illegal but quite common on Macs; or it might have found some other abnormality in the MBR and is simply being vague about the details.

I'm not very familiar with the details of OS X's Disk Utility SMART scan, but "verified" sounds like it's normal. SMART, though, produces a lot of data, and sometimes there can be hints of problems even when a utility claims the disk is OK in a simplistic overview. Most disk manufacturers provide tools that can give more detail, and you can find such tools on Linux emergency disks, too -- something like the Linux smartctl (text-mode) or GSmartControl (GUI) tools provide the sort of details required. Those details can be difficult to interpret, though, so you may need to post here or elsewhere with the details.

[Chris Pyle]

Thanks Roderick, it appears the harddrive is the root cause. It was a new samsung EVO240, luckily I replaced the optical drive with a WD 1tb media drive and I decided to format that and install OSX and it worked like a charm. I'll be sending the drive back and waiting for the replacement.

Thanks for your help Roderick. For posterity and my future install, was there any problem with the way I ran the install.sh? Do I need to move the unzipped contents of reFIND to a different directory before running it?

[Roderick W. Smith]

As long as you run install.sh from the same location relative to the other rEFInd files as what you get when you unpack the .zip file, you should be fine. Certainly running it from within the Downloads directory is not a problem.