Installing lion crashes

Question

While installing the Lion upgrade, my MBP crashes. The error message says that I have a bad hard drive. After trying to reboot, the computer goes into a unending cycle of flashing the apple image, question mark and slashed 0 image. If I force the computer to turn off, I can boot while holding down the option key and then select my hard drive. I go to the disk utilities application and verify the hard drive, which shows no problems under the old OS X 10.6.8. My MBP is a late 2008 model with 2.5ghz intel core 2 duo with 6 gb of ram and over 62 gb of hard drive space available. I have not tried to install Lion for a second time, worrying that I may lose my functioning Mac. Suggestions anyone?

Answer 1

Try this:
Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list.  In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive.  If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
Now try installing Lion.