Snow Leopard Install Hangs on "repairing volume"

[bghjkl]

i got a white screen when i booted up last night, so i saw it as an opportunity to upgrade rather than trying to fix it. I popped in a fresh copy of snow leopard, it made my white screen boot up.

before installing, i opened disk utility and erased my hard drive, and it automatically made a single partition, titled "untitled" and mounted it.

i installed to "untitled" and turned install log, and the progress bar is empty.
time remaining: about 30 minutes

log: checking catalog file is the last line, and it's been there for over 1 hour.

i restarted and now it says "volume headers need minor repairs"

"repairing volume"

and hangs there now.

any ideas?

 

[TMRaven]

What computer do you have?

 

[bghjkl]

c2d imac 20" (the first gen c2d)

it's still doing that btw, i haven't done anything.

 

[bghjkl]

as an update, i tried erasing the partition, formatting the hard drive, and re-partitioning. afterwards i verified the new partition and during verification it, again, hangs on "checking catalog file"

 

[iSee]

It sounds new, but check the install disc. Maybe it is bad/dirty/scratched/warped.

 

[gnasher729]

as an update, i tried erasing the partition, formatting the hard drive, and re-partitioning. afterwards i verified the new partition and during verification it, again, hangs on "checking catalog file"

You should investigate how to replace your hard drive with a new one. You had a failure initially, now you have failures after a fresh format; your hard drive is definitely on its way out. Even if you could get it working again, don't.

 

[bghjkl]

well i restarted again in high hopes, and it got past checking catalog file!

now it says

"volume headers need minor repair"

"repairing volume"

and hanging there.

i really don't want to entertain the idea of a hard drive failure, that just seems impossible for a computer with almost no applications on it, used for family web browsing. i'll fall back on that if all else fails.

 

[bghjkl]

any other ideas?

 

[mrwonkers]

any other ideas?

Same thing happened to me a while back with an old Mac. I tried many things and could not determine the issue causing the problem. Finally I ran Apple hardware test and found that 1 of my sticks of ram had gone bad. After swapping out the bad ram my install completed and no more issues occurred. It may pay to run AHT and see if your issue is the same one I had, good luck.

 

[bghjkl]

im starting to suspect the install disc. it (after being left on overnight) repaired the volume!

that install later failed because it couldn't verify essentials.pkg, whatever that means

i restarted and reinstalled and now its back to not being able to check the catalog file.....