SSD Shortly After Mountain Lion 10.8.2 Upgrade

mikethehamster said:

Hello everyone, I was hoping I could get some opinion on this issue I've experienced.

I purchased a 13" MacBook Pro in June and installed Lion on an intel 330 Series SSD. I upgraded to Mountain Lion 10.8.0 with the free download code as soon as possible. Everything was working fine. Anywho, I upgraded to 10.8.2 in late November and shortly after I started getting problems. The first thing I noticed was that Safari was crashing on me upon opening. Then it was other programs like Pages. Then sometimes it was every program!

here's a video of my experience:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mksh0IU6RbE&list=UUg2s-YGvVv-x1FuWlGdbisQ&index=1

This would come and go after a reset. The problems started getting worse, as the system would reset itself for no reason, prompting the "system reset because of a problem" upon restart. Spotlight would continually index itself, sometimes for a few minutes, and sometimes for over an hour. It got to the point where the system would reset itself after start up. Finally, one day I tried to turn it on, only to see that the macbook would turn itself off after a few seconds of displaying just a grey screen and the spinning gears.

I put in my old hard drive that came with the computer (currently spinning as we speak), and everything worked fine. The SSD was then put in an enclosure, and upon mounting the disk "Mac OS X can't repair the disk" popped up. I managed to salvage important files, but the drive is now "dead" so I can't even wipe it as far as I know.

I've been reading forums, and some people have said that a lion to mountain lion upgrade may be problematic and clean install would avoid the problem. What do you guys think? It just seems insane to me that a simple upgrade could brick a hard drive. Is that even possible?

Click to expand...

Sorry I don't have a theory about your situation but I have an SSD horror story myself. On my 2008 Macbook, I decided to put in an Agility 3 SSD because it was something like half price. It worked for a few days and suddenly I started having all kinds of problems with freezes. I took it to the Apple store and it couldn't even get on their wifi. So they plugged in an ethernet cable, booted from one of their known good images and the machine was fine. I took out the SSD and returned it to Microcenter. I went back to the Momentus XT 500 GB drive that I had been using and chalked it up to experience.

One thing that may shed some light on my problem is I upgraded using CCC. I've done this on 4 other machines in my house. I popped in Vertex 3 SSD's and cloned Macintosh HD to them, booted from them via usb to prove they worked, then ripped open the machine and put them in. No problem. Until I tried using the Agility 3 on my Macbook. What were the differences? On those other machines I was cloning Snow Leopard. On those other machines I used Vertex not Agility SSDs. In the future, I think I'll stick with Samsung and Crucial M4 for any possible SSD upgrades. I'll steer clear of Agility (lower cost OCZ SSD). Then comes the question of using CCC with Lion or ML. I'm a little bit worried about cloning Lion/ML because I remember that during the cloning process on my old Macbook, CCC said it was cloning the recovery partition "automatically" and I've become somewhat jaded when a piece of software says something like "trust me this is automatic".

What I recommend to you is that you stick with better grade SSD like the Samsung 830 and the Cruclal M4 and that you consider either a from scratch install followed by a migration from your old drive (which can still be done via a USB SATA cable) or a from scratch install followed by manually bringing all your stuff over.

Hope this helps...

mikethehamster said:

Hello everyone, I was hoping I could get some opinion on this issue I've experienced.

I purchased a 13" MacBook Pro in June and installed Lion on an intel 330 Series SSD. I upgraded to Mountain Lion 10.8.0 with the free download code as soon as possible. Everything was working fine. Anywho, I upgraded to 10.8.2 in late November and shortly after I started getting problems. The first thing I noticed was that Safari was crashing on me upon opening. Then it was other programs like Pages. Then sometimes it was every program!

here's a video of my experience:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mksh0IU6RbE&list=UUg2s-YGvVv-x1FuWlGdbisQ&index=1

This would come and go after a reset. The problems started getting worse, as the system would reset itself for no reason, prompting the "system reset because of a problem" upon restart. Spotlight would continually index itself, sometimes for a few minutes, and sometimes for over an hour. It got to the point where the system would reset itself after start up. Finally, one day I tried to turn it on, only to see that the macbook would turn itself off after a few seconds of displaying just a grey screen and the spinning gears.

I put in my old hard drive that came with the computer (currently spinning as we speak), and everything worked fine. The SSD was then put in an enclosure, and upon mounting the disk "Mac OS X can't repair the disk" popped up. I managed to salvage important files, but the drive is now "dead" so I can't even wipe it as far as I know.

I've been reading forums, and some people have said that a lion to mountain lion upgrade may be problematic and clean install would avoid the problem. What do you guys think? It just seems insane to me that a simple upgrade could brick a hard drive. Is that even possible?

Click to expand...

You can attempt a clean install by wiping the drive securely with an Ubuntu live cd.

Just follow the instructions here:

http://peter.membrey.hk/2011/09/11/...structions-on-how-to-securely-erase-your-ssd/

If it does it after a reinstall, RMA the drive for a new one. Intel has one of the best warranties out there. I'm currently on the 320 series and its awesome. Also, make sure you don't have trim enabler turned on. The 330 should have decent garbage collection built in.