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The Lurking Horror (10/25/98)
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Ah, Halloween-- that wonderful holiday when kids dress as little pirates and axe murderers and run around extorting the neighbors for candy. Personally, we love it. But this year, something is waiting in the shadows... and it wants your data. While a great many of us are puttering along nicely running Mac OS 8.5, all is not well in Macville. By now you may have heard about this strange phenomenon that seems to have affected a small percentage of the population of upgraders; installing Mac OS 8.5 has seemingly destroyed their hard disks utterly and beyond repair. (By "beyond repair," we mean that in some cases, not only was no data recoverable from the trashed disk, but the disk itself could not be reformatted-- at least according to some reports.) Official word of this bizarre and dangerous behavior first hit the airwaves in the form of a warning at Umax's site, in which they warn users that they experienced six lost disks when testing Mac OS 8.5's "golden master" version.
"So what?" you may be saying. "I don't have a Umax clone." Well that's just fine and dandy, but the problem isn't limited to Umax clones. In fact, Umax reports that of the six disks they lost, two were Apple-branded drives installed in Apple-branded Macs. And since then, this problem has struck several users in the field, albeit a tiny fraction of the total number of users of Mac OS 8.5. We strongly recommend that all Mac OS 8.5 users read MacInTouch's special report on this issue to be as prepared as possible, although it's maddening that in all the reports, there don't seem to be any definitive common factors that can be isolated as causing the problem.
Incidentally, if you upgraded to 8.5 and haven't yet noticed any problems with your drives, don't unclench just yet; the problem may be a sort of lurking horror. At first, the drive may appear okay under 8.5, but over time the performance may degrade and eventually the disk may disappear from the system altogether. (Not <>Iphysically disappear, of course, though that would be pretty cool.) Pretty scary, huh, kids? How's that for a Halloween nightmare? Data loss! Woooooo! OOOOOOO!! All we can say is this: back up your data. Don't be sorry later.
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SceneLink (1104)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 10/25/98 episode: October 25, 1998: If you're tired of waiting for USB peripherals for your iMac, perhaps you should consider the "mystery interface" from iDrives. Meanwhile, Apple posts an Applescript workaround for Sherlock's annoying "no sets" problem, and Halloween terror comes early for those who are unlucky enough to be touched by the Mac OS 8.5 drive loss issue...
Other scenes from that episode: 1102: Fashion Victim (10/25/98) The hacking of the iMac's internals continues. Just a couple of days ago, we made a quick reference to a Sparq drive (that 1 GB removable drive by Syquest) that was available for the iMac. That caused a little confusion, since the official iMac-compatible USB Sparq drive, in all its translucent red glory, is definitely not yet shipping... 1103: Searching for Sets (10/25/98) Mac OS 8.5 is cool and all, and we like Sherlock, the newly-revamped and newly-renamed version of Find File that is the focus of all the 8.5 hype. Searching the Internet right from Sherlock is a lot of fun, and it definitely saves time over traveling to separate search pages to enter your search criteria over and over again...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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