Corrupt Word file corrupts whole system

Yes. Sorry you found out the hard way. There are now multiple reports of problems when Auto-Save was off. So the problem occurs whenever the following 2 items are both true:

• Long and complex Word document. So far, everyone has reported embedded images, but it's not clear whether that is the key item.
• Time Machine is turned ON. It does not need to be running (ie. the circular arrow may not bechasing its tail at that moment.)

Other things are not necessary for the problem to occur

It happens both with HDDs and SSDs

It happens in both OS 10.7 and 10.8, and maybe much older OSs as well.

It happens even when a laptop is away from its backup device, because TM still makes on-laptop backups.

The only saving grace, and it's a pathetic one, is that it does not always irrevocably track your storage. Sometimes, Disk Utility can repair it. The rest of the time, though, running DU will make the problem worse!

Apple, when are you going to fix this??😠

leefromkokomo wrote:

I should further suggest that even if auto back is turned off, the make backup file during file save can also crash the system. That is what happened the second crash yesterday.

This problem only seems to occur for me when I work on a large word document (greater that 30 Mb) with a very large number of JPEG photo images.

This exact problem has happened with both a mechanical HD and flash HD with different operating system versions and two different computers. It would seem that the probability of this failure on two different storage systems on two dfferent machines over an 8 month period being cause by HD failure is VERY low.

When I got on their tech support people about it last weekend, they said that they know it's a bug and they are working on a patch at the moment. They said that they are most of the way done with it, and it should be coming to a software update near you fairly soon.

Mike

Apple, when are you going to fix this??😠

I take this as progress. When I first found this thread, people were blaming Microsoft. As I tried to explain, if there is a bug, the bug will be in OSX.

I'm glad that they have acknowledged a bug and that they are working on a fix. Thanks for the heads up.

Scott

thank you so much, people, for creating and contributing to this thread! Sherlock Holmes couldn't have done a better job of adding up clues and finding the culprit. After days of total confusion, I finally understand what has gone wrong in my computer world.

And yes, now I know to wait for a Mac OS bug-fix... it'll be in 10.8.3 I'm presuming.

But in the meantime, is there anything I can do with my damaged hard drive (in my case, a 7200rmp 500GB drive in my mid-2008 MacBook Pro)?

I've run DiskWarrior from an external fw drive that I've booted into, and it sees problems with "Overlapping Contents". But it isn't able to repair or replace these files ("DiskWarrior encountered an unexpected error while attempting to repair overlapped files", etc.). Is there something else I can try, or do I just have to wipe this drive and re-install everything, or buy a new drive?

thanks, Malcolm

IIRC, I had a similar message from DW after one of my corruptions. In my case, after reviewing the file names of interest they did not appear to be important (temp word files and a plist or two that I figured would be rebuilt by their proponent application program).

I believe that even though DW displays this error, it still goes ahead & rewrites the directory to fix any other issues it finds. So, I figured at this point the disk was as consistent as it was going to get. I booted into safe mode & let fsck do a search & destroy on the remaining issues. Fsck/Disk Utility seems to be pretty good at fixing problems by a "Scorched Earth" policy, which I guess is ok as long as your disk is otherwise consistent & you don't mind losing the files it targets.

Long story short I haven't had any additional problems, but I turned off auto recovery, and I sure as heck am not going to open that nutty 80 MB .docx of embedded PowerPoint slides again that my colleague sent me until this patch comes out & I'm darn sure it fixes the issue. :)

I had no luck with Disk Warrior, but I had a day-old backup so did not spend a lot of time with it.

I also tried Data Rescue 3. It was able to recover all files except those that were actually open at the time of the crash. It's on sale right now through MacUpdate. http://www.mupromo.com/affil/12826 Sale lasts 2 more days.

I also got an $80 external drive which is now taped to my Mac's cover! I set it through Time Machine as one of two backup locations. (Ironic to keep using Time Machine, I know, but I lost a total of about a week of productive time through messing with this stupid problem through multiple reformat/reinstalls and one total drive replacement.)

Finally, I was able to successfully ditch Word. We'll see what happens when I have to interact with students again in January.

Hey all,

As one of the earlier posters on this issue, I just wanted to report sucess in creating a large Word 2008 document (200+MB) with over 100 embedded images...all done with Time Machine off and Auto-Save disabled.

I really sweated this one; it is a book that has just now been published. But thanks to the detective work of others here, and the helpful suggestions that I followed, all went smoothly. ....OK, as smoothly as anything in Word ;-)

Happy holidays...let's hope Apple does provide us a Christmas present of a fix to this bug!

You can reboot in target disk mode and make a copy of the drive or a backup for restoration.

Malcolm Hamilton wrote:

thank you so much, people, for creating and contributing to this thread! Sherlock Holmes couldn't have done a better job of adding up clues and finding the culprit. After days of total confusion, I finally understand what has gone wrong in my computer world.

And yes, now I know to wait for a Mac OS bug-fix... it'll be in 10.8.3 I'm presuming.

But in the meantime, is there anything I can do with my damaged hard drive (in my case, a 7200rmp 500GB drive in my mid-2008 MacBook Pro)?

I've run DiskWarrior from an external fw drive that I've booted into, and it sees problems with "Overlapping Contents". But it isn't able to repair or replace these files ("DiskWarrior encountered an unexpected error while attempting to repair overlapped files", etc.). Is there something else I can try, or do I just have to wipe this drive and re-install everything, or buy a new drive?

thanks, Malcolm

Thanks mmw, but I don't want to make a copy of a drive that has conflicts and overlapping files, etc.

Am I wrong to think that that's a problem? Wouldn't cloning a drive clone over whatever problems exist on the drive as well?

I was planning to install a new drive and do a clean install of Mountain Lion, and then clean install all of my apps as well. I haven't done this in years and years (o.k., I'll confess: decades!).

Regards,

Malcolm

OMG! I didn't reallize this was an OS issue! 😮 After this happened twice on the same doc (it kind of did the same on my Mac SSD but I never ran a disk repair), I actually bought a new drive for my wife's computer. But it sounds like it's not the drive - but in fact the OS. Wow! Well, at least I have a spare SSD for her early MacBook Air. 😐

Well, in actuality, Office for Mac is what it sounds like. I've experienced the issue on two systems as well (like others have noted) - Thank goodness for Time Machine as I wouldn't have ben able to repair these systems otherwise. This isn't the first time Microsoft has seriously crippled Office for Mac users (remember the Office 2008 SP2 lack of XML support?). I guess it's time I rip out the last Microsoft product I have left.

I wonder if Office for the iPad (iOS) will be just as flawed....

The Word file corruption issue is not limited to OSX, Windows users also report it (Word 2007) and also report it in conjunction with Word's Auto-Recover system

Anyone have any update on this issue? I'm back from vacation & was just handed an 80MB .docx to review. Trying to stay corrupt-disk free in 2013.

Go to your time machine preferences and turn it off while word is running. If your problem is the same bug as the one described here, that should keep it from happening. Until a patch is released that addresses the problem, keep time machine turned off (and I mean completely off, not just unhooked from the backup disk, make the icon stay gray instead of black).

Hallo,

i don't know how to email you.This is the wrong item. but i give it a try.

I was setting up a local webserver in mountain lion. IIt works! is okay. But when i type in safari http://my local site/~tineke

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /~tineke on this server.

I think something is wrong with permissions. Can you help me to fix this?