Startup disk?

I managed to get Tiger installed onto the external drive at last, or I think I managed...

For some reason so is the drive not recognized as a start up disk and even if the Tiger installer recognize the drive nicely so doesn't Leopards let me boot from the drive, the normal key combinations like c, or didn't work. I even tried the firewire target mode without any success.

Next step is to try to install Leopard onto the external drive to verify that I can boot from it or perhaps to install Tiger on a partition on the internal hard drive... once again -

To be continued...

Finished with the backup, now I have to remove it...

The backup was finished tonight at 02:00 so it only took 12 hours instead of the projected 36. When I earlier today tried to install Tiger I noticed that the computer wouldn't boot from the DVD that I was given. It wasn't able to start the install icon from the mounted image under Leopard either.

To make this post a bit shorter the problem was:

1. Unable to boot from the DVD.
2. Unable to run the installation from the mounted file.
3. Unable to boot from my previous setup external hard drive.

The first of the problem I haven't found a way around, but fixing problem two removes the need to boot from the DVD:

After a dozen of forum pages I came across the solution in the middle of this post: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=443017 look for the post from Melee. I didn't manage to figure out how to insert the MacBook4,1 string and where he where refering to the GoodHardware but this post http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071203051319476 made me try to run the OSInstall.mpkg directly and it worked.

Now the problem was however that I was unable to use my external hard drive as an installation drive since it was not using the GUID Partition Table scheme, which apparently wasn't the default when I split the drive into two partitions yesterday.

To fix this problem here are a short bullet list of what I did after I accepted that my previous backup would be lost:

1. Remove all partitions using the minus sign, using the erase option will create a new partition still hiding the option button.
2. Press the option button and select GUID Partition Table.
3. Partition as you like.
4. Ignore that the information at the bottom shows Apple Partition Table, what is in the Option dialog will be used once you accept the changes.
5. Press Accept and the drive is ready to use.
   

I have now installed Tiger onto the drive so it's time to restart and see if it works...

Preparing for downgrade...

I got the Tiger DVD on Friday and ordered an external hard drive to use for backup and to install Tiger on while I'm waiting for the update of Leopard.

I got the hard drive today and started the backup process for over six hours ago. So far less than 17GB of a total of 117GB has been backed up.  If this speed continues it will take me another 24 hours before I can start my Tiger installation... Well the reports said it would take some time to make the initial backup for time machine but this is much worse than what I could imagine, the drive is connected over firewire 800 so I doubt that's the bottleneck.

To be continued...

Visiting a Mac store...

A friend of mine gave me the idea to go to a Mac store and see if all computers had the same problem - so I did.

Both the new 15" and 17" Mac Book Pro (those with the multitouch) had the problem, the tested iMac and Mac Pro did not have the problem, and the normal Mac Book, Mac Book Air and older versions of Mac Book Pro wasn't tested.

To trigger the bug here is an updated description:

1. Set the dock to autohide.
   
2. Open Excel.
3. Press the plus sign so Excel fills out the main monitor (the one with the dock)
4. Change the zoom level to 150%.
5. Ensure that the formula bar is visible.
6. Drag the formula bar to the bottom of the screen.
7. If the computer doesn't freeze directly (the UI) test to drop the formula bar at the bottom and then start to drag it again and move it quickly up and down at the bottom left portion of the Excel window.

When I first got the bug verified on one of the computer one of the employees gave me the obvious answer to why it crashed, "typical Microsoft" I wish that would have been the reason but she didn't give me a chance to explain the problem and I was not interested in proving her wrong at this time.

3 out of 4 applications has malfunctioned

See the picture above for my first experience of typing in Word for Mac. Word crashed while I was typing, this was however not the same bug as before since I was able to force quit the application and the rest of the computer seems to work as normal. Hard to know if there is any connection with the other problems I been having. The problem might also been an effect of losing my Internet connection for a while, anyhow I'm looking forward to my copy of Tiger or the new release of Leopard whatever happens first.

Application used for more then just test:

1. Eclipse - No identified bugs
   
2. Safari - Froze the computer once
   
3. Parallels - Turn the screen into garbage when settings display settings in Mac OS X while running windows.
   
4. Numbers - Froze the computer on basically every usage.
   
5. OpenOffice - Ran extremely slow and had to be terminated.
   
6. iOrdning - No major problem so far (some minor glitches like crash on exit)
   
7. Excel - Froze the computer when moving the formula bar to the bottom.
   
8. Word - Application froze while entering text.
   

Changing Wildcat

The bug evolved further, from specific cases that I have been able to reproduce the computer froze while I was surfing in Safari.

Enough is enough (almost) so I talked to the support and will get Tiger instead, I assume this is like when people downgrade from Vista to XP, guess the commercial is going both ways.... Well will try out Tiger while I wait for an update of Leopard. Should talk to after sales now and ensure that I can return the computer if the problem doesn't get solved.

The bug evolved...

I managed to reproduce the bug in Excel even without my external monitor which partly makes this bug worse then when it happened in Numbers. To trigger the bug in Excel I can have any spreadsheet (empty aswell). I maximize the window (+), change the zoom to 150% and then drag the formula bar down to the bottom of the page. I then drop the formula bar at the bottom and before I pick it up again and start moving it up and down at the bottom of the page so that the window resizes, after a few times the window manager is freezing with identical symptoms to the Numbers bug.

I just got of the phone with the support and I will return to them as soon as they open the second level support in Ireland after 9:00. I'm not up for a lot of more testing so I hope that they will be able to give me a prerelease of the new update of Leopard and I hope that that can solve the problem since the other alternative will be to return the computer since I can't really work with a computer that crashes on every other applicaiton I'm using.

-- Update

Talked to support again and there was nothing they could do for me, tried to find out if I could turn of the hardware acceleration but they didn't know of anything like that.

While searching the net I found that there has been a simular problem with the new iMac:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5778210

Still haven't decided what to do, but to get an iMac doesn't seem like an alternative :-P.

What's next?

So I managed to get after sales to give me a refund towards buying Microsoft Office in expectation that that would solve the problem...

Since last I have managed to transfer my information onto the replacement Mac which took about 4-5 hours. When finally everything was working it was however a quite neat migration process if however slow.

I have stopped using Numbers and started to play around with Excel instead, guess if I lost my breath when I got a similar fault in Excel, this time it wasn't while I was working in the document but when I rearranged the windows instead. Wonder if Vista is a good choice of OS? All I wanted was a computer that was working, how hard can it be?!

To be continued....

The supports knows about the fault...

... but have no solution until an update of the graphical drivers is released which can take between one to six month if not longer.

They thought that using openoffice was a sufficient workaround for the time being, and I do agree that what I have been using in the past but that's not the reason I bought iWorks and Numbers? Have to see what after sales can do to try to restart my Mac experience in a better manner.

Any excel file can cause Numbers to freeze Mac OS X interface

After yet another discussion with the support have I tested to create a completely new file within Numbers and exported that as an Excel file which I then continued to edit on after reopened it. The spreadsheet originally only contained one column with dates and then I added some text in a few cells.

The bug was shown after adding some lines (two for example) and inserting information in the shown schema. The bug is present only when I have my external monitor connected.

If anyone likes to get the excel file to test the problem feel free to sent me a message.