Tiger update forces some to reformat
updated 07:15 am EST, Mon November 26, 2007
Tiger update, data loss
Apple may have knowingly shipped its latest Tiger operating system update with a bug that could cause complete data loss on Macs with Apple's Boot Camp installed. Echoing a growing support thread in Apple's forums, a report by Macworld UK suggests that older Macs with Boot Camp partitions may suffer a system error on restart when users install the Mac OS X 10.4.11 update: although the problem affects unknown number of users, it is reportedly acknowledged by Apple support as a known issue and requires affected users to completely reformat their drives. The consequences not only include complete data loss in some cases, but also the inability to re-install Boot Camp, as the software -- bundled with the newest Leopard operating system -- is no longer available to Mac OS X Tiger users. Some users in Apple's own forums have reported success retrieving data from the Mac partition when using it as "target FireWire disk."
"Reports from trusted sources indicate Apple may have shipped the software update with a known bug, and owners of some Macs have seen their systems become inoperable since installing the software," the publication said. "When restarting, users find their Mac partition hangs in the blue screen. Apple support staff appear to suggest the only solution is to erase the entire drive an all data in order to resolve the problem."
The report said that the flaw is known to have affected an analyst firm's former Apple analyst:
"It is evidence (in my opinion) of very sloppy software release. To crash a system on a known problem with Boot Camp is 100 per cent totally unacceptable. People (like me) have just too much stuff on their systems to be having to start over with hard disk reformat," the analyst told Macworld UK.
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REALLY sloppy story
This story is so incredibly sloppy that I can't even believe it.
First of all:
- This does NOT affect all 10.4.11 users. The vast, overwhelming majority of 10.4.11 users have not experienced this issue. At our site alone we have hundreds of Tiger Boot Camp users, and have not seen this problem.
- Because it only affects such a small fraction of 10.4.11 users, there is NO EVIDENCE whatsoever to support any claim that Apple is "knowingly" doing anything of the sort to get Tiger users to stop using Boot Camp.
- The claims made in the linked article are BS:
1. There is no reason I can think of why an Archive and Install wouldn't work to recover from the situation.
2. There is no reason I can think of, even if an Archive and Install didn't work, that just the Mac partition couldn't be erased and reinstalled. And no, this isn't some "special case". There is NO REASON why simply erasing the Mac partition, as opposed to reformatting the entire drive and losing the Boot Camp partition, wouldn't work. And on top of that, an Archive and Install should work.
3. The article seems to imply that all data is unrecoverable. Whaaa? At the very least, you can always view the contents of the drive from another system.
This is a sloppy, sloppy article and deserves to be killed here and now before it starts getting picked up everywhere as Apple trying to somehow kill off Tiger Boot Camp users. (To say nothing of the fact that Boot Camp for Tiger was ALWAYS advertised as use-at-your-own-risk unsupported beta software that would effectively disappear once Leopard shipped.)
What a shamefully ridiculous story.