SL upgrade installation failed and now macbook won't boot

Hi all,
I did some searching in the forums, but I couldn't find this answer -- I'm sorry if it has already been asked/answered.
I have a 2.5 yr old intel macbook that was running leopard, and I bought the SL upgrade.
My mac has been hovering around 0-10 gigs of free space for the past 6 months or more. It tends to stay very full since I have a lot of photos and music. When my HD reaches it capacity, I usually connect up to my timemachine (500gb) and dump off 10-30 gigs of pictures, then repeat the process.
So, I had around 4 GB free when I tried to install SL, it said it wasn't enough so I deleted some movies/downloaded content quickly, restarted, then tried again and with 7-10gb free (I don't remember exactly) it let me begin the install and choose my Mac HD to install it to.
I came back and it said there was an error and it needed to restart and try again.
After restarting, the mac can no longer find the boot disk, and I put the CD back in and did disk diagnostic. The diag said it needed to try to repair. I tried to repair and it said, this in unrepairable. You need to try to save off as much data as you can, clean/clear the disk and reinstall the operating system.
If I try to restart the system and let it load normally, it stays on the grey Apple loading screen with the spinning circle. After 30-60 seconds it just turns off because it is failing to mount or boot the disk (I'm assuming).
Does this seem strange? My computer is basically saying the disk is done and you need to reformat, but I don't feel like it's really corrupted. When running the diag test, the app unmounts the disk to test and then can never re-mount until I restart, so that's also weird.
I have not backed up my computer in 40-60 days so I would really be taking a step back if I just wiped it right now then tried to get some data back from my time machine.
Is there a way that I get access the disk somehow to move data to my time machine, or USB, or something, before I wipe it out? Also, can the SL disk wipe and reinstall the OS or do I need the OSX Tiger/leopard installation disks?
Thank you very much for any advice, sorry again if this is a repeat question.
Jordan Godbey

jgodbey wrote:
Hi all,
I did some searching in the forums, but I couldn't find this answer -- I'm sorry if it has already been asked/answered.
I have a 2.5 yr old intel macbook that was running leopard, and I bought the SL upgrade.
My mac has been hovering around 0-10 gigs of free space for the past 6 months or more.
This is VERY bad. you should keep at least 10% (better 15%) of drive space free at all times to avoid potentially serious problems resulting from disk fragmentation. they can lead to ALL kinds of issues including catastrophic directory damage which you likely got.
It tends to stay very full since I have a lot of photos and music. When my HD reaches it capacity, I usually connect up to my timemachine (500gb) and dump off 10-30 gigs of pictures, then repeat the process.
this is a VERY bad idea too. Time Machine is a backup tool, not an archiving one. using it as an archiving tool as you did can and will lead to data loss. TM constantly thins its backups. it keeps hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for 30 days and weekly backups till the TM drive is full. the backups are thinned without warning. and when the drive gets full it starts deleting old backups to make room for new ones. it's supposed to warn you about it once if you have that option checked in system preferences. but this warning is only given once and sometimes not at all.
So, I had around 4 GB free when I tried to install SL, it said it wasn't enough so I deleted some movies/downloaded content quickly, restarted, then tried again and with 7-10gb free (I don't remember exactly) it let me begin the install and choose my Mac HD to install it to.
I came back and it said there was an error and it needed to restart and try again.
After restarting, the mac can no longer find the boot disk, and I put the CD back in and did disk diagnostic. The diag said it needed to try to repair. I tried to repair and it said, this in unrepairable. You need to try to save off as much data as you can, clean/clear the disk and reinstall the operating system.
If I try to restart the system and let it load normally, it stays on the grey Apple loading screen with the spinning circle. After 30-60 seconds it just turns off because it is failing to mount or boot the disk (I'm assuming).
Does this seem strange?
no, it doesn't.
My computer is basically saying the disk is done and you need to reformat, but I don't feel like it's really corrupted.
oh yes, it is. the only wonder is that this didn't happen sooner given that you were keeping the drive as full as you did.
When running the diag test, the app unmounts the disk to test and then can never re-mount until I restart, so that's also weird.
I have not backed up my computer in 40-60 days so I would really be taking a step back if I just wiped it right now then tried to get some data back from my time machine.
Is there a way that I get access the disk somehow to move data to my time machine, or USB, or something, before I wipe it out? Also, can the SL disk wipe and reinstall the OS or do I need the OSX Tiger/leopard installation disks?
you don't need leopard or tiger disks. you can do a full system restore from TM using the snow leopard disk. you can try to get some data off the drive first. do you have access to another mac? does your macbook has a firewire port? if yes you can boot it in target mode, connect it to another drive by a firewire cable and copy what you need to a different drive from there. otherwise you'd have to either do it from terminal while booted from the SL DVD or install SL on an external drive , boot from that and do it from there. also, you can try using Disk Warrior or a similar tool on your main drive. It may work where Disk Utility failed.
Thank you very much for any advice, sorry again if this is a repeat question.
Jordan Godbey

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