Mountain Lion damaged my hard disk

Question

I tried installing ML in my iMac running Snow Leopard, and I also got the hard disk damage problem.
It seems some people that were running Lion have been able to run de Disk Utility booting from the Recover Partition, which is not featured in Snow Leopard.
I also saw people suggesting to use Disk Warrior or Tech Tool Pro to recover the disk, but haven't heard of any positive feedback and I am not paying to solve a problem I did not create.
This seems like a major bug in Mountain Lion so far being ignored by Apple. I have heard of people taking their computers to technical support and the people at Apple suggesting to replace the hard disk, which is a pretty convenient solution, since they are not the ones losing their files.
If the installation of ML not even started, how come I cannot switch back to my status quo and boot normally in my Snow Leopard? I am really disappointed about this situation and I would like to hear from people who were able to recover their computers from Snow Leopard, especially people at Apple that seem to be silent about this problem so far.

Answer 1

hpr3, I understand your point that maybe my disk might already have a prior issue, but it doesn't seem a coincidence to me that many others have had the same problem upgrading to ML and suddently had their disks crashed.
It's not a coincidence, but neither is it the fault of ML.  A drive that is slightly corrupt can, when a major system upgrade writes tens of thousands of files, become very badly damaged, corrupting the system and potentially user data.  It happens to some people with every system upgrade and update.
I did not run the disk utility before the upgrade. I would expect the ML installation to do it before permanently compromising my disk.
That's the way it's supposed to work.  Many people with problems end up being told that they can't install because the disk can't be repaired.  However, some problems manage to persist.  No disk repair tool is perfect.
Utlimately, although you say you're not paying to fix a problem you didn't create, you did create the problem by not having backups.  Backups are a responsibility every computer user has, regardless of OS.  If you had backups, the fix would be simple and cheap....  erase the hard drive and restore from backup.  Since you don't, you will end up spending some time and possibly money resolving the problems, and you may not see some of your data again.  If the problem is fixable, DiskWarrior can likely fix it.  (It doesn't try to repair the directory structures, it simply rebuilds them from scratch.)
It would be wise to try to back up what you can before doing that, but that will be tricky with a damaged drive.  You could try connecting to another Mac using Firewire target mode, and copy what you can that way...  but you're likely to have some errors interrupt the process.  You could also try using Disk Utility's Restore pane to copy the disk to another hard drive, but again, the errors are likely to complicate things.  You could also try copying vital files with the Terminal while in recovery mode, if you know how to use Unix commands.