Mavericks strangnesses

[MacInWin]

OK, I know none of these are global, or the universe would be screaming and all a-boil with flames everywhere, but I have some curious challenges with Mavericks.

For background, I have a MBP 17", 8,3, early 2011. I have a 480-GB SSD from OWC as boot drive, and moved the 750GB HD to the optical bay with their data doubler. I have my home directory on the HD, keep Applications on the SSD. I have a Thunderbolt Monitor to which my external drives are attached by FW and which then attaches to my TB port on the MBP.

I downloaded Mavericks and it installed just fine. Here are the strangenesses:

1. Has anybody actually installed from the USB installer? I created the USB installer on a USB stick three times, once using the "unhide files" approach, once use the newest version from the guy who created the ML installer application and once using the sudo command from Lifehacker Australia. All three ended in a USB stick that boots, that let's me run the Disk Utility and which fails at the install with a message about the installer having been amended and refusing to go any further.

2. Time Machine backs up, but when I invoke TM to see the backups all I get is a black screen on the MBP and a frozen screen on the second monitor. I have the TM disk attached to the second monitor and must admit I've not tried eliminating that by connecting the TM drive directly to the FW port of the MBP, but before Mavericks, TM worked just fine by dropping down my desktop to show the TM screen with all the backups along the right edge, blacking out the second monitor. I can use Finder to see that the backups ARE being made, and I did a restore from one of them with no problems through the USB boot process, but TM doesn't want to let me see the backups directly, for some reason.

3. Prior to Mavericks Disk Utility could verify my OWC SSD drive just fine. Now if I use Verify Disk, it hangs at the checking drive bitmap stage, never completes. I can see in Activity Monitor that the CPU usage for it drops to 0, disk activity stops and basically the processes seems to have ended, but I never get the last two steps of the verify reported as completed nor the results of the verify. I've tried two different SSD's (The OWC one and a new one from Crucial) with the exact same results.

4. Photoshop CS6 reports an error on startup that it cannot calibrate colors because of an application problem. No updates at Adobe, no screaming in their forums, and once I ignore the error message, PS seems to work ok.

So, anybody got any ideas of how to get past these for me? As I said, a quick Internet search didn't yield much from other folks, so it must be something on my end.

 

[harryb2448]

See if any of this help MacInWin:-

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5498097?tstart=0

Made a USB thumb drive the way set out in the Lifehacker thread. When booted from options it appears as Mavericks Installer but I did install from the Applications Fioder so never tested the thumb drive. Be interesting to see the outcome. Obviously a little different to Lion and Mountain Lion setting up the thumb drive.

 

[dtravis7]

I can not comment on the Photoshop one as I do not have that version.

I did mine from my 8GB PNY USB stick. Did my usual Disk Utility route except for having to mount the other file inside the image then copy the folder over manually. Worked great. Install went perfectly.

Time Machine backup and later use was like normal here.

I did a DU Verify today on my 1TB WD Black and it was fine.

So not sure what is up on your end. Try the thread Harry posted above. See if anything there helps.

 

[MacInWin]

I re-downloaded the installer, followed the Lifehacker Australia directions again and this time it booted and allowed the installation. I did a clean install, just in case the previous installation file had some problems (I had installed from the Applications directory before), and that seemed to go properly. So that one part is solved for now.

Time Machine is getting weirder. I booted with the Thunderbolt cable disconnected, so no access to the TM drive, then started Time Machine. It properly slid down the desktop and then reported that the TM drive was not attached and offered a menu to select a target drive. I cancelled out of that, then connected the TB cable, let the drive be discovered by OSX and went to System Preferences to see what TM thought was the TM drive. It was correct, but just to be sure I reselected it and TM seemed happy with it. But when I tried opening TM, I got the same black screen on the MBP and frozen screen on the Thunderbolt display. I thought perhaps it needed to inventory my backups, so I let it sit there for a hour, with no change. I clicked the ESC key and my desktop came back and the TB display unfroze. So TM "works" without the TM drive attached, but doesn't with it attached. And as I said, it's doing the backups when the drive is attached, so it knows what to do, just won't display it to me.

DU works fine on all my spinning drives, and it works OK if I boot from the USB stick and verify my SSD that way, but it still doesn't verify the drive if I've booted from it. I can live with that, but it's a step back from what ML, Lion and SL did, IMHO. Makes it very unlikely I'll do much checking on my internal drives going forward, and just wait for a failure.

 

[vansmith]

I can't speak to much of that (either you've resolved it as you did with the installer or I don't know anything about it) but I just wanted to let you know that diskutil has some verification and repair switches if you're interested (see the man page here). Maybe give those a go.

(I'm assuming that you know how to use the CLI - I feel as if you've demonstrated your knowledge of it before).

 

[dtravis7]

I wonder if it's something with the new DU and your SSD that it does not like? Only thing I can think of as it seems to work here with my 1tB Rotational drive. Will do more testing after dinner and report back. I also have no Thunderbolt so that might be the missing issue.

 

[MacInWin]

Called Apple, played "stump the techie" on the Time Machine problem. Level one support pretty quickly gave up, moved to level two. Level two was also very helpful, very stumped. Got it down to something in MY account. We created a new user and TM worked fine. Back to my account, same problem. Changed display settings to Mirrored and the problem resolved. Moved the top bar to the second display and TM showed up on the Second monitor, sort of. The upper left corner was black (about the same size as my display on the MBP itself) but the TM display was on the bottom of the screen and the right edge. Tried safe mode and blocking all my login unique startup applications, no change. They had me run some diagnostics and then send it back to them so the next level up can see what it is that is interfering with the monitors.

Fun!

 

[dtravis7]

Very cool actually that they are helping and getting to the bottom of it! Keep us posted! Very interesting.