Laptop Crashed During Maverick Install -- Need Help

Question

Hello Everyone,
Before we get started, I just want to open with this info: My Macbook Pro is from 2008, and has a notorious habit of crashing... I hear what sounds like a rhythmic "ticking" sound from within the laptop, and everything on screen freezes up, and I have to do a hard-reboot. Other than that and a few graphical glitches with games, it runs seamlessly and had a good 19 GB free while attempting the update. Also to note, I have a BootCamp partition of about 30 GB for Windows XP. Additionally, I was an IDIOT and did NOT set up Time Machine or make a backup for my files, because, I repeat, I'm an IDIOT apparently.
So I had 10.6.8 installed -- Snow Leopard... and I heard there was a new free update to 10.8.0: Maverick. Of course it peaked my interest and I tried to install, not realizing it could potentially brick my laptop! Shoulda done some research
Anyway, here's what happened:
The download was successful, so I rebooted my computer and initialized the installation. Everything was fine, it said it would take about 50 minutes (even though it took a LOT longer)... and the install got not even half way before my computer crashed, with the infamous ticking sound. I was like, "oh sh**" because everyone knows that a crash during a major install is not good news. After I restarted the computer, it opened up the Maverick install again immediately, and attempted to retry... but within 10 minutes, an error pops up: "Install failed: OS X can’t be installed on the disk, because a recovery system can’t be created. Visit www.apple.com/support/no-recovery to learn more."
Of course at this point, I'm confused. I have no idea what that means. So I try to reboot to see if it would help, and the same error occured twice more.
This time, when I rebooted, I held Alt-Option to see if I could just select my HD drive and bypass the install. Nope. The only options were this: "Windows Partition, Maverick OSX Install, recovery-(something something)"... my HD drive wasn't even listed! This made me nervous. So, I selected the recovery disk option and it opened a menu with a few options, including reinstalling OSX, disk utility... etc. So I selected disk utility. I then proceeded to select my HD drive, and click "repair" in the first aid tab. It took about 10-15 minutes, but it successfully finished, giving me a green "Disk seems ok" message. This was a bit of relief. But now that the disk is repaired, how do I access it and exit the endless loop of Maverick installation? Do I need to reinstall OSX with my original disk/Snow Leopard disk?
Please help me recover my HD drive... I desperately need my laptop for school.
Thanks in advance. If you need any more additional info on my computer, I will be happy to try and provide it.

Answer 1

if you have no install disk, best to do fsck. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214 hopefully that will do something for you. when you say it "freezes" at startup it is hard to know what to tell you. there are different types of screens that occur with startup issues. this is an incredible article for startup issues--http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106464. do not worry that it says "10.3.9 or earlier". these steps are reliable for tiger as well. i hope that works for you.[:)]