This weekend has been well for lack of a better term miserable. I’ve burned 90% of my weekend trying to figure out what has been causing some very odd behavior on my computer, as noted in my previous post Beware OS X 10.5.3 Bug That Destroys Adobe PSD Files. So what could I possibly be doing that has taken up so much of my time this weekend sorting through this mess?
First based on the corruption and disappearance of files on my production drive I’ve lost all faith in my previous OS and application setup. 10.5.3 and Adobe CS3 are not playing nice together. As a result I needed to generate a working environment that I could trust. Previously I had no problems working with CS3 in OS X 10.4.11. I decided to backup my second internal hard drive, erase it and install OS X 10.4 (AKA Tiger). That took quite a bit of time as the drive was full with about 230GB of data. Once backed up I tried installing 10.4 off the install disks only to face repeated kernel panics. I then tried to start up off of the 10.5 install disk also to face kernel panics. Eventually I was able to install 10.4 on my computer (a G5 Quad with 4GB RAM) by hooking it up to my older G4 workstation in target mode (essentially as an external drive). I then installed 10.4 and tried to restart it only to face another kernel panic. I got the G5 back in target mode and upgraded the 10.4 to 10.4.11. I was then able to restart my G5 on its own under Tiger (10.4) versus Leopard (10.5). It would seem that somewhere between 10.4 and 10.5.3 a change was made altering the firmware for my G5… I can only guess that is what happened to cause the kernel panics. After getting my computer up and running on its own I had to spend the time installing all my applications again. At a minimum I had to get CS3 with updates and Lightroom in place to get my work done this coming week.
That only took all of Saturday and into Sunday late afternoon.
Second I started down the path of digital detective to find out if things now work with out further corruption. Is it a bug with CS3 and 10.5.3 or is it a corrupt external hard drive. It’s now 11PM on Sunday and I still don’t have a definitive answer. With various tests conducted I’m not seeing any problems in 10.4.11 and I’ll need to go back in and test some file alterations in 10.5.3.
One thing is clear though being your own IT person is the pits. Over 2 days wasted not getting work done that I need to tackle. I’m not happy about it and its yet to be determined whether my frustration is going to be directed at Adobe, Apple or my hard drive manufacturer. Through it all I’m actually fortunate because even though I lost a weeks worth of work my paranoia and backup strategy has proven to be viable. I don’t have to go back very far to replace the files that are now corrupt or missing. It should be interesting to talk to Adobe technical support in the coming day or two.
Digital imaging… it sure is a time saver.
[tags]Adobe, CS3, Apple, 10.5.3, OS X, bug, photography[/tags]
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Jim , don’t corrupt me. As a newbie mac owner, I am still under the impression they are easy!!! I am not listening – la la la la.
@Mark They are easy in general. Unfortunately my computer isn’t the newest so that had some impact to the ease of managing this situation. As for bugs with the Apple OS X this is the most severe I’ve seen and from all accounts this actually is a problem with Adobe’s old code.