Corrupt Word file corrupts whole system

Yup -- and you'll hear it's a hard drive problem even though you (and I) saw it on a MacBook Air with a solid-state drive. 😕

Why would it be a hard drive problem if it is a Microsoft Office problem???? Perhaps moving away from that bug filled program into something with is much more powerful such as Adobe InDesign may fix your problems. Whatever, it is (again it needs to be pointed out to users) that it is up to MS to sell software compatable with OSs they claim it will be supported on. Hard Drives???? Where did you get that idea from??

Good Luck

Pete

Kidstolondon wrote:

Good job of describing the problem that many of us have experienced.

Stand by to be told that by others on this message board that your computer(s) are experiencing hard drive problems...despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary 😉

It is not a hard drive problem, it is a Microsoft Office problem and it has a simple cure. Stop using MS junk.

I'm with PeterMac on this ....

A little follow-up. Turned off the autosave feature in Word and that worked sort-of. As I stated in the last post, was working in the same document in the Windows version of Word within Parallels for a couple hours without incident. There came a time where there was something I needed to do that I could only do in the Mac. Shut Parallels down and started working in the Mac version of Word. Since the autosave feature was disabled I did not have any problems until I saved the file. As soon as I hit save, Word crashed, I received the disk error and there was nothing I could do except restart the computer. (This is on the MacBook Pro not the Air).

The computer would not boot and I could not repair the disk. When it tried to boot, it would shut down when the progress bar reached the same point as it did when the Air would shut down. The manner in which my Pro acted was identical to the Air.

Again, on both the exact same file was opened with the same version of Word and same version of Mountain Lion. In both cases the hard drive crashed when Word tried to save the file, absolutely no prior issues. One computer has an SSD drive and the other a 1TB drive, about a third full. I cannot accept the possibility they both go bad at the same time under the same conditions. And both reformat and restore without issue. Additionally, the Air has a bootcamp partition and it has had no issues during this entire process.

There is no chance this is a hard drive problem. Whether the actual problem is with Lion/Mountain Lion or Word I can’t answer, but Word is clearly the trigger.

Now I have no choice but to work with Word, but for now I guess I am working in Windows and time I will be dealing with a larger file.

Greg

This may help some.

The document I was working on I opened up in Word for Windows, compressed the pictures, which reduced the file size from 74 megs down to 5.5 megs. Opened it back up on the Mac and everything was working fine. (I needed to make to two photographs semi transparent then superimpose them on each other, which you can do in the Mac version and not the Windows version). Added one more photograph, and it started acting up again.

This time I started getting the errors that appeared the first time I worked with a very large file. I can’t recall the exact language of the errors but they were essentially, the disk is full or corrupted, try saving the file under I new file name. If you try to do this, you were then presented with an error that you could not save the file because the process was in use. If you saved it a second time, you got an error you were using an invalid file name, the file save as screen would go blank, but it would save (under the new name). Finally at this point Word would crash.

After the file was saved the file size went from 5.5 megs to 68 megs in size. I had only added one more photograph.

Can’t say for sure what the error is, but it is clearly related to the high resolution photographs in the document. For whatever reason, Word is not handling the images correctly and it is causing it to produce all kinds of errors. I suspect, if I were to open this file back up, it will crash my hard drive again, not worth the effort, since I have made the changes I needed to make in the Mac version and can go back to the Windows version.

I ran the disk utility immediately after this occurred and it verified fine and there was no errors.

Not meaning to ramble, but hopefully, this will help some who have had similar problems or avoid them all together.

Greg

pjfarmer wrote:

Yup -- and you'll hear it's a hard drive problem even though you (and I) saw it on a MacBook Air with a solid-state drive. 😕

What does that have to with it, SSD and HD still use the same file system, or do you actually think that there is some physical damage going on that does not affect the SSD's

I'm just being cheeky. At some point in this LONG thread it seemed some were insisting that these problems were due to physical defects on hard disks and had nothing to do with Word or with OS X. I should have resisted making my comment -- ignore me and move on. 🙂

I am fully aware an SSD drive can go bad. The point in my case, two completely (physical structure) different drives, on two different machines. Yet they “fail” in the exact same manner while the same file is being accessed by the same program. Yet I am supposed to believe they are both defective hard drives and the errors were not caused by a software issue. Right?

Same file system, same failure.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! I'm with you, and hope your nightmare on 2 machines will put the drive failure theory to bed at last. Thanks for taking the time to document your experience!

Wrong. Same program failing on both machines. Not drive related. Drop that theory straight away. It is in the file structure of MS Word or Office.

Pete

Same problem with my 3 months old SSD drive. It's a macbook pro 15.4 late 2011.

I've erased the entire disk and re-isntalled everything from a backup image. I've also eliminated office 2011 and istalled office 2008. Actually, utility disk doesn't find any problem on the disk. Hopefully, the problem is only due to the autosave function in office 2011.

I'll let you know if the problem appears again.

Why on earth would you wipe the entire disc and reinstall from a backup if MS Office is your only problem? Especially on a three month old disc!!

Pete

Because it was impossible to repair the disk after the word message appeared. The only solution wasformatting the disk!! It's absurd but it looks word is also able to corrupt a disk....

Just had this same problem with a macbook air, Lion, mac word 2011. Was adding tiffs to the document, the file was starting to get large, around 25MB, when it appeared to try to auto-save, and the file system was toast. Really awful bug!