Corrupt Word file corrupts whole system

Kidstolondon wrote:

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! 😉

Like you I am an Apple user not an Apple employee and I do not appreciate YOU YELLING, fix it yourself.

Chill....I'm not yelling at you. Apparently the old Saturday Night Live line about the economy ("JUST FIX IT") wasn't on your radar screen. sor-ry.

I bought the MSWord software at an Apple store...that implies some shared responsibility.

Not really. The App Store is simply a repository of vetted apps. Apple is no more responsible for what Microsoft writes than Adobe, Quark, or anyone else. The vendors who wrote the apps are the only ones with access to the source code, and of course then are the only ones who can fix any known issues.

Ah, so if a car manufacturers sells you an accessory that they say works with your car, and it ends up causing the engine to blow up, they aren't responsible? You're a pretty forgiving customer, IMHO.

It's not about being forgiving, it's about being realistic about where the problem lies and who is responsible. If Microsoft Word is responsible, then it's Microsoft's problem to solve. They are the only ones with access to the code.

Ah, so if a car manufacturers sells you an accessory that they say works with your car, and it ends up causing the engine to blow up, they aren't responsible?

You don't say the they is. If you're referring to the company who made the car, then the answer is no, they are not responsible. The company who made the accessory is.

Likewise, if an update to Excel suddenly caused it to incorrectly sum 2 and 2 as 5, there wouldn't be a thing Apple could do about it. MS would have to fix it.

I had the same problem stated here. I am using Word 2011 with OS X Lion. When I was writing a report (just 40 pages but including a couple of figures) suddenly I got an "unrecoverable disk error" and all I wrote, even though I saved it, was lost. Also the fan went crazy. I run the disc utilities which did find tons of errors and fixed it, so I thought everything would be fine. But no, the problem reappeared in an hourly rate. Then I went to the apple store but the only comment was that the hard ware is fine, and they can't help me with Word. Only due to this forum I came across the solution. Since I turned off the time-machine, the problem never returned! So eventually it is not just a Word problem but how Word and Time machine (isn't this an Apple product?!?) work with each other.

I think the people at the Apple shop did take it a bit too easy. They should check properly if it could not also be a software problem of one of their products before they send desperate customers away.

3 MacBook Pros all have the same issue... contrary to some posts here this seems to be a very real problem unless mac has started using some really crappy hard drives. Sometimes people just read the forum and fix the problem without having to say "Me too"

The same issue here. A google search brings up dosens of instances of reports related to this issue some going back to a year ago. Some Microsoft forum moderators reported that as of Feb. 2012 redmond people have been scratching their heads to find out where the issue comes from. Turns out the itch hasn't subsided yet. I am very angry at Microsoft for having destroyed the result of my hard work, but also I feel ashamed of not having been able to eradicate this last piece of Microsoftware from my computer.

epollari wrote:

Thanks, mszargar, for exhaustively confirming that this is a real-life bug. You must have noticed our resident troll, etresoft, implying that I'm delusional and in need of psychological counselling for flagging the problem here. He should work for Microsoft if he doesn't already.

I know I'm clutching at straws, but I'm wondering if anyone who was upgraded to Mountain Lion is still seeing the problem.

I use Word on ML (among others) there are no problems at all, I rarely generate more than 30 pages but once or twice i have had 100 page plus documents, they were just fine.

epollari wrote:

Thanks, mszargar, for exhaustively confirming that this is a real-life bug.

That's some circular logic there. This "exhaustive confirmation" consist of your posts in the Microsoft support forums.

If you don't like my advice, then, by all means, follow the suggestions of the Microsoft forum moderators:

It's far more likely that hard drive problems just happened to become evident during the saving process. I'd advise that you run a drive tool such as Drive Genius and let it check the drive for bad blocks and rebuild the volume and directory structure.

I mean, what is easier than saying: you are bogus, not the software! Anyway, have you ever seen any consumer level software license that takes the liability for the damages caused by the software? Isn't it funny that we find that normal? Can you imagine houses built by architects or surguries done by doctors with no liability insurance? How come software companies can take the revenue in and outsource the damages to us?!

The issue still exists on Mountain Lion. At least the threads that I follow on Microsoft website keep growing. Actually, I have experienced the issue on my Mountain Lion based iMac (no SSD) on which time machine, office recovery and dropbox were enabled. I did not get a critical haddisk condition this time, but I did lose one complete day of work and got some filesystem errors that I could easily fix with Disk Utility.

Now I run Word for windows (could get a copy from my school) in a virtual machine (oracle has one for free) with the old good windows xp installed (from my 9-year-old dead laptop). I suggest you do the same until Microsoft explicitly announces it has solved the problem (obviously they won't announce that they have not).

I am happy you are not affected by this issue, but this does not mean the software is bug-free. Hope this never happens to you, it is really unnerving. This said, I do not want to be alarmist here. This is a condition that arises extremely rarely. Still, the developers have, at least, an ethical responsibility to solve the issue.

Yes I have cross-posted this issue in all the relevant running threads in several forums, and I hope everybody does that, because I don't see any other way of warning the others and letting the companies know about the prevalence of the issue.

Sincerely, I do not understand your implication with and your interest in this case. If you have not experienced this same issue and you do not represent Microsoft, please stop making pointless level-1 support contributions. We all know how to keep our filesystem clean, how to maintain our hard disk and how to configure a backup program. I do check my harddisk regularly, like any other experienced user, and I have two bakcup solutions constantly enabled because I can not afford data loss.

This is not a general write issue. The issue arises ONLY with Microsoft word, although I regularly and heavily use Excel, Powerpoint, Aperture, Lightroom, Scrivener, Papers, etc... Some of these are Microsoft software, and some of them make hundreds of automatic write operations per minute. With some of them I have experienced other issues (Scrivener used to have a conflict with DropBox), but I have never run into this specific write issue with any other piece of software.

I don't understand by any means in what way it can be legitimate for a software to tell me it is saving my data for seven consecutive hours while it has problems doing so (the log file of the versioning system monitoring my directory does not show any activity on the specific docx file I was editing during those 7 hours), and while it is corrupting my fs in the background. The minimum is to receive a write error alert, I hope you agree with that.

Plus, if you read my previous post carefully, I referred to the posts of a Microsoft forum moderator. If he is mentioning on a public forum that Redmond is actually looking into this issue, why are you so sceptical about it?