Help with Mavericks recovery

[chris-zeel]

I have an iMac 8.1 with SSD and Mavericks installed.
Upon startup I get the flashing folder with questions mark, that tells me that it cannot boot.

I have a Mountain Lion boot USB (which is actually an install disk, I think, but this should be the same, right?), and with that I checked with Disk Utility if my disk can be repaired.
After verifying the disk, it tells me everything is fine with the disk.

So I guess the OS on the disk is damaged.



Can I use the Mountain Lion boot USB and reinstall OS X, and thereby preserve my files (settings are not most important).

I do have most of my data on an external HDD, but would have some valuable files the SSD (photos, documents and bookmarks).



Thanks for your help!

 

[Weaselboy]

Let's back up a bit. So you installed an SSD and had Mavericks running successfully on it? Then it just started with the ? mark business all on its own?

That sounds like your SSD is dead.

What do you get with a command-r boor to recovery? If you can boot to the recovery partition on the SSD, you can reinstall Mavs from there. Or, as you said, you can reinstall ML from your USB key.

Neither will erase your data if you just reinstall. Things is if the SSD is dying, reinstalling the OS may make it more difficult to recover important data from the SSD... if that is even possible.