Corrupt Word file corrupts whole system

Completely awful. Mac and Word user users should be adviced about that. I'm sure it's a Word bug as I've had the same problem where 2 different machines (macbook pro late 2001 (SSD) and mac pro (HD), where Ive been working with the same word document.

gibbsdavidl wrote:

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!

Turn Autosave off

Done. Keeping files in dropbox for versioning.

Yeah, it was the "overlapped extent allocation" error... and who do you guess was overlapping?

1. /private/var/root/.Trash/../Word50528(etc).tmp

2. /Users/me/.../Office Automatic Recovery/ WordWorkFile.tmp

*and* the surprise guest

3. /Users/../Music/iTunes/.../ one of my mp3s!

-dave

I didn't know exactly what an "overlapped extent allocation error" was, so I looked it up:

If Disk Utility reports “overlapped extent allocation” errors, two or more files occupy the same space on your disk, and at least one of them is likely to be corrupted. Check each file in the list of affected files. If you can replace a file or recreate it, delete it. If it contains information you need, open it and examine its data to make sure it hasn’t been corrupted. (Most of the files in the list have aliases in a DamagedFiles folder at the top level of your disk.)

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5836

My takeaway is that when working with large Word files with lots of embedded content, Autosave in Office 2011 is prone to creating overlapped extent allocation errors. Turning Autosave off seems to avert the problem. Indeed, this has worked for me. (But it still stinks.)

pjfarmer wrote:

snip

My takeaway is that when working with large Word files with lots of embedded content, Autosave in Office 2011 is prone to creating overlapped extent allocation errors. Turning Autosave off seems to avert the problem. Indeed, this has worked for me. (But it still stinks.)

Pete

Not just Office 2011, this issue goes back to Office 2003 on Windows and 2004 on Mac.

Ok- this has me a bit freaked out... some questions:

1) which autosave to turn off? Autorecovery info? Auto backups?

2) Do you think a sparse-image would take care of this? i.e., I could work with all word docs in a sparse-image file that's a fake hard-drive... if that gets corrupted, oh well... hopefully I'll have the sparse image backed up in time-machine?

3)- I hope you all know of the Time-Machine/word bug- where saving can't work if time-machine is turned on? [so turn off time-machine before working in word! ugh...- maybe I'll make a little work-flow or droplet app to turn off time-machine, launch the needed word-doc, then turn on time machine after word quits...]

Any advise is appreciated!! I can't afford to lose data or my machine to this bug- working on my thesis. ugh.

I believe that I am unfortunate to now be experiencing this same bizarre problem.

I was working on a document which had swollen to around 40mb in size with a single large map in it.

Word came up with the message about unrecoverable read/write error. CPU rapidly rose and I copied off my documents, recognising this as an unusual occurence.

Restarted in recovery mode, Disk Utility was unable to repair the drive.

The computer would no longer boot, powering off during the safe mode progress bar. The computer would also not boot from any external sources.

I went to the Apple store, as all the issues were consistent of a hard drive failure, which the Genius also believed. The hard drive and its cable were replaced.

Two days later, editing the EXACT same document, the same issue occurred again. The Mac is now back at Apple having its logic board replaced 😟

I too thought it would be nigh on impossible for Word to cause such horrendous effects to the system, but now I'm starting to believe that it is possible. It is fairly unbelievable that the OS X kernel permits such destructiveness.

It sounds like the problem was the logic board the whole time. I don't think that anyone has claimed that this Word crash will render a system unbootable by any means.

wait for it...and it did not take long...only a matter of time before someone who denies the reality of this problem weighed in with another explanation (i.e. logic board). Sure it *could* be the logic board, but that would be a wild coincidence given the perponderance of evidence that use of large Word files w/ embedded graphics is causing severe and otherwise unexplaned problems.

But just for our collective information: was autosave "on" in Word and was Timemachine active when your computer went haywire?

On the contrary, that is exactly what I have contended. The same Word file has corrupted two different computers, completing corrupting the hard drive, in such the only way to repair it was to format the drive and do a complete restore. Since restoring both computers no other problems since I have avoided working with large Word files on my Macs.

Russell0986 wrote:

On the contrary, that is exactly what I have contended. The same Word file has corrupted two different computers, completing corrupting the hard drive, in such the only way to repair it was to format the drive and do a complete restore. Since restoring both computers no other problems since I have avoided working with large Word files on my Macs.

MS Office is becoming increasing unreliable and not just on Macs. If it is causing such corruption on your machine, then you really should be looking for an alternative, of which there are many, that open all old Word files and can also handle large file autosaving. Office is the verge of extinction with Windows8.

Cheers

Pete

epollari wrote:

Etresoft. You may want to reread the very first message in this chain, where it says:

"Disk repair won't fix the disk and Mac OS X won't boot up any longer."

It's been a recurring theme ever since. Better get reading glasses.

I already have reading glasses. I didn't comment because there isn't any clear, definitive information about this. Some people say it won't boot. Other people say it won't boot from "external sources" but recovery works. Which is it? You can boot the machine without any hard drive at all so how could corruption be a definitive cause for that?

The fact remains that the few people claiming unbootable disk corruption are simply going to have a very difficult time convincing the millions of other people using Word every day since Lion was released that there is some kind of problem.

The first time, Time Machine was active but not plugged in. The second time it was active and plugged in. Auto recovery was on both times.

With regards to the logic board, somebody else in this thread mentioned that the issue arose after their logic board was changed. In any way related?

I've just got to hope that my Time Machine backup is actually in a fit state for the second time around :(

I too find it absolutely astonishing that a program used by millions is arguably causing problems on only a handful of computers. Millions of people must do very similar processes every day. Is there something else we are missing? Did any of you have firmware passwords enabled? Any other wacky pieces of OS X we use that no one else uses?