Mac OSX Mavericks

CGabriel

Industry Expert
Oct 31, 2013
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I highly warn everyone about upgrading your Macintosh to Mavericks operating system. It has destroyed several of our hard drives including expensive solid-state drives. Once you install Mavericks you cannot return to a prior version of OSX even if you reformat the hard drive.
 

Sauerball

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Jul 30, 2013
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I highly warn everyone about upgrading your Macintosh to Mavericks operating system. It has destroyed several of our hard drives including expensive solid-state drives. Once you install Mavericks you cannot return to a prior version of OSX even if you reformat the hard drive.

Mavericks or Yosemite?
 

JackD201

WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
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My G5's drive crashed some time ago. I had no idea Mavs was the culprit. Grrrrrr.
 

GaryProtein

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Jul 25, 2012
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I think you mean Yosemite.

I know a few people who have upgraded and they really like it and have no glitches.

I plan to do it soon myself.

I was told any computer running Mavericks can run Yosemite.

Yosemite is OS X.10. The first eight OS X operating systems were cats. I don't know what a Mavericks is. I wonder if the next run of operating systems will be national parks.
 
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rblnr

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May 3, 2010
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No probs for me across thre Macs and a combination of SS and spinning drives. I like it so far. Looks great among other things, a full expression of the direction Maverick took.
 

CGabriel

Industry Expert
Oct 31, 2013
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I think you mean Yosemite.

I know a few people who have upgraded and they really like it and have no glitches.

I plan to do it soon myself.

I was told any computer running Mavericks can run Yosemite.

No, I mean Mavericks.

I have been a Mac user since the first Macintosh and the Apple II before. We are a Mac company and have many of them. One of them started running slowly and then developed email database problems. Then, more odd random glitches. My IT manager who is an ex Boeing computer security expert tried many tests and diagnostics to fix the problem with no success.

Then, on the weekend I formatted the drive and attempted to reinstall the OS. It would reformat successfully. It would fail at a specific section of the install. Then, I tried erasing the drive and writing all ones to the drive. It would fail at the same point in the process. This was repeated two more times with same result.

We had another Mac that would fail when copying multiple graphic files. The Finder would stop responding and when restored some of the files were left in an open state owned by the system and could not be opened. Restarted and tried again. The file copy not only failed, it crashed the OS - hard. The computer completely rebooted. This is equivalent to the blue screen of death on a Windows PC. We are now running diagnostics.

A MacBook Pro was upgraded to Mavericks. Then we attempted to reinstall a prior OS version 10.7 but a message popped up saying that installing a prior OS version was not supported supported this machine. This was after formatting the drive with Disk Utility. Before the reinstall we plugged a portable SS drive to the Mac visa USB to backup some files. The file transfer failed and then the drive would not function on any computer. All of the computers above have SS drives except the first.

What it looks like to us is that Mavericks is writing a hidden partition or file to the drive. The OS is designed to ignore it including the Disk Utility. If you ever worked with Windows this appears to be something like they did with hidden and locked .AUX files.

If you do a search on the Internet you will find other people that are having similar issues primarily with external drives. We believe that this problem as likely affects SS drives.

I am not amused. Fair warning. YMMV and all that.
 

CGabriel

Industry Expert
Oct 31, 2013
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I've upgraded to Yosemite on all my devices and have had no problems

http://www.zdnet.com/western-digita...-mavericks-may-destroy-drive-data-7000022800/

Whatever the problem was or is - it has not been fixed and we are quite certain it is not specific to WD problem.

Why a major OS upgrade (Yosemite) after Mavericks was only released in October of last year?

One of the iMac's we have a problem with is new - only two weeks old and it had Mavericks preinstalled. So, if you haven't gone to Mavericks, wait and skip to Yosemite.
 

BlueFox

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Nov 8, 2013
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rblnr

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
May 3, 2010
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Why a major OS upgrade (Yosemite) after Mavericks was only released in October of last year?

They're on a yearly upgrade cycle with OSs.

Not disputing your experience obviously but most of the post-production houses I've seen that run Macs are on Mavericks -- they run a ton of graphics with multiple arrays of servers, etc and it's been stable.
 

GaryProtein

VIP/Donor
Jul 25, 2012
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I like Mavericks with a few exceptions.

I don't like some changes they made in Safari--I don't like having "top sites" show up at all in the bookmarks bar and not being able to completely turn off "top sites" as well as a couple of other things I have forgotten because I got used to not having them any longer. I don't like the "Natural" scrolling--I like the old way better, I don't like the automatic "correct spelling as I type" because it often changes what I type to INcorrect words, but at least I can change those in my system preferences.

I have not had any crashes and also find the system to be stable.

BlueFox, thank you for letting me know what "Mavericks" beach is.
 

still-one

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Aug 6, 2012
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No problem with our machines and Yosemite. I like everything so far except how the Safari displays sites in the menu bar. Tougher to grab information to paste.
 

CGabriel

Industry Expert
Oct 31, 2013
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Does destroyed drives mean they will not work in a good system? If so then that is nasty.

Yes, they are destroyed. When installed in another Mac or PC they do not even register as a drive even with disk utilities. Obviously, the Mac OS is complex and now is designed to run on different hardware architectures so the problem is probably specific to a set of conditions and actions by the OS that is not common enough to cause a mass a riot by the General Mac population.

I don't have the inclination to destroy more hard drives just to satisfy my curiosity about the specifics. We do move very large numbers of graphics and audio files from computer to computer over the network. This can take 4-12 hours. In two of our cases that is when the failures occurred.

We upgraded four Macs to Mavericks and 3 of them have failed. I guess I could tell you about the one that still works but what does that prove?

OK, just thought some of you might like to know.
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
I like Mavericks with a few exceptions.

I don't like some changes they made in Safari--I don't like having "top sites" show up at all in the bookmarks bar and not being able to completely turn off "top sites" as well as a couple of other things I have forgotten because I got used to not having them any longer. I don't like the "Natural" scrolling--I like the old way better, I don't like the automatic "correct spelling as I type" because it often changes what I type to INcorrect words, but at least I can change those in my system preferences.

I have not had any crashes and also find the system to be stable.

BlueFox, thank you for letting me know what "Mavericks" beach is.

Gary

I refuse to use Safari and use Chrome on all my devices including my iphone
 

joeinid

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2011
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NY
Caelin,

I'm so sorry you've had these problems. Thank you for warning us about your experience. I usually wait these days to upgrade but I've read your posts a day late. I have several Macintosh computers running great. Mostly pre-Mavericks except for one Mac mini that I updated to Mavericks a while ago. I got the itch and saw the Yosemite update so I jumped. No back up this time, I just went for it. Now it's totally scr*wed and will not boot. It has conventional spinning 500gb drives. I hope you get everything sorted out. For me this computer is not life or death, just a supreme pain in the *ss now.
 

still-one

VIP/Donor
Aug 6, 2012
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Milford, Michigan
These issues you are reporting seem very odd. I spend a lot of time on the Macrumors site which have posters that would readily post issues such as this and I see nothing. Whenever a new product or software update is released individuals with problems post them quickly. Nothing has been posted. Maybe it is posted on another Mac site where I do not participate.
 

CGabriel

Industry Expert
Oct 31, 2013
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WA, USA
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These issues you are reporting seem very odd. I spend a lot of time on the Macrumors site which have posters that would readily post issues such as this and I see nothing. Whenever a new product or software update is released individuals with problems post them quickly. Nothing has been posted. Maybe it is posted on another Mac site where I do not participate.

Yes, I hear you and understand. I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist but it is looking very odd. We just recovered one of the SS drives with a reformat. So apparently the drive is not always corrupt beyond recovery. Remember some of these Macs ran for months with no problems and they would slow down and start to exhibit odd behavior. For some reason the utilities don't seem to find the problems. But if you run an erase with an all 1's option the problem will show up.

Type this into Google: "mavericks drive corruption"
 

CGabriel

Industry Expert
Oct 31, 2013
618
92
265
WA, USA
www.shunyata.com
Caelin,

I'm so sorry you've had these problems. Thank you for warning us about your experience. I usually wait these days to upgrade but I've read your posts a day late. I have several Macintosh computers running great. Mostly pre-Mavericks except for one Mac mini that I updated to Mavericks a while ago. I got the itch and saw the Yosemite update so I jumped. No back up this time, I just went for it. Now it's totally scr*wed and will not boot. It has conventional spinning 500gb drives. I hope you get everything sorted out. For me this computer is not life or death, just a supreme pain in the *ss now.

Well, that is discouraging. I was hoping that whatever the problem was, that it would have been fixed in Yosemite. Right now I have my personal Mac back running. I am just going to avoid doing any over the network file transfers until my IT guy can be assured that the problem is resolved. We are looking into the possibility of some very advanced virus that may have eluded the virus software. It does act like a virus.
 

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