Corrupt Word file corrupts whole system

Hi etresoft. Systems programmer here with 15 years experience that had this problem. Word with AutoSave + Lion + TimeMachine triggers a race condition in Lion that floods syslog with hard drive errors and causes 100% CPU until you reboot. The LAST thing I looked for was this. I replaced hard drives and emailed the word file to another Macbook before I started believing it could be a bug in Lion. But it is. There ya go. It is rare, but this is the real deal.

You seem to be in disbelief that it could corrupt a healthy hard drive. No one is claiming that. The physical drive is not harmed. The HFS+ file systems gets corrupted.

dill.sellars wrote:

Systems programmer here with 15 years experience that had this problem.

Me too 🙂

Word with AutoSave + Lion + TimeMachine triggers a race condition in Lion that floods syslog with hard drive errors and causes 100% CPU until you reboot. The LAST thing I looked for was this. I replaced hard drives and emailed the word file to another Macbook before I started believing it could be a bug in Lion. But it is. There ya go. It is rare, but this is the real deal.

Rare indeed. Half a dozen anonymous internet postings out of literally millions of users.

You seem to be in disbelief that it could corrupt a healthy hard drive. No one is claiming that. The physical drive is not harmed. The HFS+ file systems gets corrupted.

I never suggested that the hard drive was being physically damaged. I said the most likely cause was a hard drive that was physically corrupt to begin with.

To repeat what I said above - Word has millions of users. If this problem existed as described, there wouldn't be 31 replies in this thread, there would be 31 pages. This thread follows a typical pattern where someone experiences some anomaly, gets support from a few "me too" posters, and convinces themselves that some bug in an operating system used by 40 million people is causing the issue. Instead of taking action to address their problem, they sit on their hands and wait for Apple to "fix the bug". They wait. And they wait. And they wait. All the while, the rest of the world carries merrily on as if nothing is wrong - because nothing is wrong.

Well, count me among those with this fantasy bug. I have the magical Word 2011, Lion and SSD combo and just got bit by this bug for the second time. Left unsaid in that combo appears to be large documents, potentially with embedded media. Both times (a month apart) I have been using MS Word's audio note feature including a 1+ hour recording.

Download Open Office, use it for a week instead of Word, post back.

Hi, I'm just a writer with a deadline an a 40,000 word report that keeps displaying this problem. It has had me going around in circles for days.

Short of writing in open office has anyone got a solution - does turning off autosave actually work?

Is there any sign of an actual solution or just arguments about niceties.

If you have the problem described by several of us here you have two options. (1) Turn off autosave, or (2) turn off time machine. Either will work, both have drawbacks. I choose to turn off autosave and hit save a lot. This has worked jsut fine for me. Sorry, you had to experience this error too, it is really frustrating!

Yes, turning off autosave works. I've been running that way since March and haven't seen the problem since. Before that, I was seeing filesystem corruption at least once a week while editing certain (very large / complex) documents.

Sadly, since I am using MS Word for the Audio Notes functionality Open Office is not a great option for me.

Maybe you will want to try Dictation in Mountain Lion. It will work with anything.

It's actually not a dictation service. It ties typing to the sound at the moment. I'm taking notes from another speaker, so if I need to fill out the notes, I can click directly into that 5-10 seconds of audio. Apparently this isn't a really well known feature in Mac Office (MS put the feature into Onenote for Windows users), but useful to me.

Neither using, nor crashing, Microsoft Word will corrupt a healthy hard drive.

Any proof of this?

Corrupted file systems are very rare.

They are rare in the world of Mac OS X systems. File corruptions post are not rare in these forums. A lot of folks find their way to these forum with harddrive problems.

Why does Apple provide Disk Utility repair a file system? It implies that files system get corrupted.

These firms have file system recover utilities. Firms like to make money on what they do. If it was always a bad disk drive hardware, the file system would get mess up again. These utilities would get a reputation for temperarily fixing a problem.

I advised being more understanding of posters. To repeatedly dismiss a problem with it is absolutely a harddrive failure isn't helpful. To state the possiblity once is all that is needed.

Perhaps Disk Warrior will be of some help:

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

"Stellar Phoenix Macintosh - Mac data recovery software, recovers data from damaged, deleted, or corrupted volumes and even from initialized disks."

They have a trial version, so I guess you can see if your data can be recovered...

http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-recovery.htm

"Data Rescue II is the best data recovery software on the market for recovering files from a problem hard drive. Data Rescue II works when other tools fail. Data Rescue II is also completely safe to use since it does not attempt any risky repairs to the drive while its scanning."

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

FileSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have:

-- been accidentally deleted.

-- become unreadable due to media faults.

-- been stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.

http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id= 1

"TestDisk is a free data recovery utility. It was primarily designed to help recover lost data storage partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally erasing a partition table)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk

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"*Hard drive data recovery and warranty implications*

Hard drives that have become non-functional through normal use, and have had data recovery performed on them by DriveSavers or Ontrack Data Recovery can be returned to Apple for warranty service. This includes products covered by the AppleCare Protection Plan. The cost of any data recovery attempts is not covered by the Apple Limited Warranty."

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3974?viewlocale=en_US

rccharles wrote:

Neither using, nor crashing, Microsoft Word will corrupt a healthy hard drive.

Any proof of this?

Yes. I did an exhaustive analysis of 1.2 billion hard drives and...no...wait... I didn't do that. I just used common sense.

A lot of folks find their way to these forum with harddrive problems.

Including the original poster. I think it does a disservice to the original poster and anyone reading to entertain a suggestion that Word is causing this issue. Obviously the cause is a corrupt hard drive. When people convince themselves that it is some application or operating system bug then that encourages them to continue using a hard drive that has solid evidence of failure. While waiting for that ever-elusive file corruption bug fix from Microsoft and/or Apple, they will experience more problems and blame it on Microsoft and, more likely, Apple.

I advised being more understanding of posters. To repeatedly dismiss a problem with it is absolutely a harddrive failure isn't helpful. To state the possiblity once is all that is needed.

This is a tech support forum, not psychological counseling. I think that people would rather have me try to solve their actual software and hardware problems instead of being "more understanding" and accepting that something is possible. Anything is possible, but of that set of all possible occurrences in all possible universes, the vast majority are not bloody likely.

Glad to have found this discussion. Despite the contrarian views posted by one expert here, this is a very real problem with large Word files and, yes, it does result in a corrupted hard disk. Now turning off autosave and (temporarily) Time Machine.

I bought Macs to avoid this kind of B.S. 😠

Kidstolondon wrote:

Glad to have found this discussion. Despite the contrarian views posted by one expert here, this is a very real problem with large Word files and, yes, it does result in a corrupted hard disk. Now turning off autosave and (temporarily) Time Machine.

I bought Macs to avoid this kind of B.S. 😠

Then why did you contaminate your Mac with Microsoft products, and why would you blame Aple for Microsofts software misbehaviour?

I bought the MSWord software at an Apple store...that implies some shared responsibility. But as a customer, I don't care whose fault it is, really, JUST FIX IT! 😉