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It took two weeks, but Lion finally ate itself

osxhero

osxhero

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 23, 2010
106
27
Running along beautifully. Was dealing with all the latency issues. Have it installed on Mac Pro 8-core, Macbook Pro 17", iMac, and a Mac Pro 4-core.

Last night I was doing some basic graphic work on my laptop when my saves started to take longer and longer. Eventually I got the Beach Ball of death, and decided to reboot. Mind you, it took 15 minutes to get all the running apps to Force Quit, but they did.

After a reboot my laptop just sat and spun and spun. Never reached the login page. I pulled out my backup drive, slapped it ink and it booted fine, phew, the CPU and computer itself appeared to be fine.

After 6 solid hours of diagnostics, it turns out that Lion literally ate the drive in a cascading sector wipe. For those of you who don't know what that looks like, imagine randomly scratching your grandpa's WAX LP then trying to play it.

I'm now VERY worried about the rest of my machines. Is it only a matter of time? My drive had tons of free space, so it wasn't trying to swap blocks etc. It simply died.

I reset the PRAM. Tried to reinstall Lion through the recovery, and the drive is so destroyed it can't read the Lion installESD.img that it wrote to disk. Nice.

Now I have the joy of calling Adobe and begging them to give me another activation number. Lovely.

Beware, Lion ain't ready for primetime. 10.7.2 is probably your best bet. That is if you're a professional using your computers to make money.
 
Damn man. I know some cats will chime in with "you shouldn't put a new OS on a production machine without testing!!" and all that, but I'm sorry to hear all the grief that Lion is giving you. It's weird how some machines (like mine) have relatively minor issues with it, and some get completely screwed.
 
And what's the evidence that tells you Lion is to blame? Hard disks do break you know. Fortunately, it doesn't happen all too often these days, but they do break. And no matter how rare, it is a helluvalot more likely for a mechanical hard disk to fail than it is for an OS to destroy one. SSD's are even worse. Just because you installed Lion recently doesn't mean it has anything to do with it.
 
My wifes machine is having a similar problem. I've got 3 other Macs that have no isses at all.

After debugging for a while I found that both of her RAM stick were failing memtest, and the larger memory caches that Lion uses are excercising the bad RAM in a "more-breaky" way then SL does.

A question to the OP, are you using filevault2 on the machine that ate itself?
 
throttlemeister said:
And what's the evidence that tells you Lion is to blame? Hard disks do break you know. Fortunately, it doesn't happen all too often these days, but they do break. And no matter how rare, it is a helluvalot more likely for a mechanical hard disk to fail than it is for an OS to destroy one. SSD's are even worse. Just because you installed Lion recently doesn't mean it has anything to do with it.
Click to expand...

Same thing happened to me, one of my primary 2TB drives is shot, good thing for backup. I think it has to do with widely reported Lion finder hangups in either finder specific tasks such as data transfers and or app heavy use, launch, close with large cache dumps, etc. in my case, it was the deleting of 1,800 raw files from a folder that sees heavy data transfers. The finder locked, I let it sit for about 20 minutes then had to do a very much dreaded forced re-start. This is on a brand new Mac Pro that has been simply brilliant until Lion came along...

Don't be so quick to fanboy....
 
Highly doubt Lion made the HDD fail (unless you have evidence to the contrary); sounds like a normal case of HDD failure.
 
DesmoPilot said:
Highly doubt Lion made the HDD fail (unless you have evidence to the contrary); sounds like a normal case of HDD failure.
Click to expand...

If you have a hard freeze during a intensive task involving the HDD, you can at least corrupt files and therefore sectors, I have seen it happen before, even with enterprise class drives, I have backup for this reason. It could very well be the OS, often a vicious circle dragging a lot of things into the mud along with it.
 
I have a new I Mac and it has a hard drive recall!

Macshroomer said:
Same thing happened to me, one of my primary 2TB drives is shot, good thing for backup. I think it has to do with widely reported Lion finder hangups in either finder specific tasks such as data transfers and or app heavy use, launch, close with large cache dumps, etc. in my case, it was the deleting of 1,800 raw files from a folder that sees heavy data transfers. The finder locked, I let it sit for about 20 minutes then had to do a very much dreaded forced re-start. This is on a brand new Mac Pro that has been simply brilliant until Lion came along...

Don't be so quick to fanboy....
Click to expand...

I have a new I mac 27", Upgraded to Lion and so far no problems, but AGHHH it is part of a product recall. The HD's have been failing so I guess I will have to take a new machine for repair. Clearly not so perfect and my new found faith has been tested.
 
osxhero said:
Now I have the joy of calling Adobe and begging them to give me another activation number. Lovely.
Click to expand...

Last time I had to do this (hard drive crash in a MBA) Adobe was extremely easy to deal with. I was pleasantly surprised.
 
The ability to physically destroy hard drives wasn't in the list of 250 features. :rolleyes:
 
Macshroomer said:
Same thing happened to me, one of my primary 2TB drives is shot, good thing for backup. I think it has to do with widely reported Lion finder hangups in either finder specific tasks such as data transfers and or app heavy use, launch, close with large cache dumps, etc. in my case, it was the deleting of 1,800 raw files from a folder that sees heavy data transfers. The finder locked, I let it sit for about 20 minutes then had to do a very much dreaded forced re-start. This is on a brand new Mac Pro that has been simply brilliant until Lion came along...

Don't be so quick to fanboy....
Click to expand...

Thank you. Yes, Lion abused the drive with a random sector wipe. It's a very easy thing to verify. Full sector scan of the drive. Performance test of the device driver. Ensure that the proper boot settings are present.

Oh Yeah, I also reformatted the single partition with the problem and guess what, it's working great now...well, until I actually use it and perhaps experience it again. Granted I was saving a large 4 meg file, oh wait, that's not large.

I love Lion. This post was merely to let folks know that someone else had the same issue they had, and to outline my recovery path. My laptop is a pure backup machine for home. Nothing unique lost save some browser history at best. Now if my Mac Pro died, I'd be seriously pissed, but that's why I have several backup drives. ;)
 
Macshroomer said:
Same thing happened to me, one of my primary 2TB drives is shot, good thing for backup. I think it has to do with widely reported Lion finder hangups in either finder specific tasks such as data transfers and or app heavy use, launch, close with large cache dumps, etc. in my case, it was the deleting of 1,800 raw files from a folder that sees heavy data transfers. The finder locked, I let it sit for about 20 minutes then had to do a very much dreaded forced re-start. This is on a brand new Mac Pro that has been simply brilliant until Lion came along...

Don't be so quick to fanboy....
Click to expand...

Ah, so if you point out the FACT that a mechanical drive is more likely to fail due to a hardware problem than an OS physically destroying said drive, you are being a fanboy. :rolleyes:

It is also FACT that most (not all, most) drives fail within the first 2 months of operation, which in your case since you state your box is brand new, makes it even more logical for a hardware failure. But I guess I am just a fanboy. :rolleyes:

But we will forget the little detail of all that is offered here is SPECULATION without any substantiated proof that Lion has anything to do with it. I guess if you are not a hater, you must be a fanboy. :rolleyes:

I would very much like to know if there is something in Lion that can cause failures and data loss. I do have backups, but backups can get corrupted too and I am kinda fond of my data. But unless any of you can come up with some proof or some way to reproduce the problems to substantiate your speculated claims, I stand by my point that the most likely scenario is a plain old hardware failure and not the OS.

I will give you this though: sometimes software can trigger an already present latent hardware failure. In which case the software is still not to blame, but merely exposed a problem that was going to happen anyway.
 
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