I've managed the 'unmanageable'!

I've crashed my MacBook Pro.

Being a proud owner of my MacBook Pro for a whole week, one of the greatest attractions was the probability that it was 'impossible' to crash.

Well I've managed it - sadly. The whole MBP froze up (3 times now) - it seems to be associated with Time Machine.

The first time I tried, it spent all night attempting to copy 23 mb of 65 Gb.

The (dedicated) external 300Gb USB2 hard drive gives no errors in Disk Utility but the system freezes - even the Force Quit did not work - completely frozen. It took pressing the Power button until it shut down. It restarts beautifully but repeats the crash when I attempt the back up.

So guys (and girls!) what do I do now?

As a Bill Gates refugee, I am quite used to crashes and would probably reinstall Windows over the top of the present OS. Do people DO this in the Mac world - I'm sure it shouldn't take 8 hours to copy 23 mb!!.

Any help gratefully received.

brianwmay,

Took me awhile to understand TM... I was clicking on the TM icon in the dock, expecting it to backup, and nothing seemed to be happening. Then I found out I had to open TM via the System Preferences box and click on TM in there. Then it would ask for where the external is and then prep it, then at your command start the backup, and if you check it, a bar masures backup progress.

Is that the same way you started TM, in System Preference?

Did you open Disk Utility earlier and partition the external hard drive? I think you'll do better to partition it, even if a single partition, so it can format the drive correctly.

If you started TM correctly and you're getting that response, I'd say you may have a bad external hard drive. Do you have a different machine you can test it on, like maybe a Windows rig? Just to prove that it's good...

Noel

I don't really have a suggestion, unfortunately, but the first time I used Time Machine, it was with the iTimeMachine plugin, so that I could use my NAS drive (prior to 10.5.2, obviously). That first copy took almost a day and a half, and slowed the machine down horribly. Since then, however, time Machine has been nearly flawless in operation.

Can you try clearing the backup? As in, delete it from the external drive, and also clear your current TM settings, and then starting over? What happens then?

Make sure the external is partitioned as hfs+ with journaling. My WD Mybook came as fat32 and i noticed time machine didnt like it all that much....

First off, all computers crash. Occasionally an application will quit unexpectedly or the screen will freeze. But I'm sure it's still a lot less than on Windows.

I suspect it's a hard drive problem. The files should copy at normal speed. Like Chimpur said make sure it's formatted as HFS+.

Chimpur said:

Make sure the external is partitioned as hfs+ with journaling. My WD Mybook came as fat32 and i noticed time machine didnt like it all that much....

Click to expand...

I had similar challenges when trying to use an external drive with Fat32. Best bet is using Disk Utility to set up the external drive as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition, then letting Time Machine at it.

The first backup takes a really long time but they go smoothly in the background after that. I barely notice it's working now.

TM is now working BUT . . .

The original disk hasn't - I'm mystified as to why, because I DID let TM prepare the disk first.

In desperation because (you always do don't you?) I thought my MBP was 'the duff one from the production line of perfect machines', I tagged a small laptop drive (in caddy) into TM and lo and behold, it's worked perfectly.

My main drive which is a month old (the one not currently working) now reports a GUID partition of the correct size and TM 'says' that it appears OK. More thought required about that one - and research.

Incidentally, using the 110Gb 2.5 inch USB drive, 65 Gb of backup took a couple of hours and is updating regularly (I DO WISH I HAD CONTROL OF THE CONFIG as I only really want to back up once a day - even whilst I'm learning and managing to **** things up regularly).

Still . . . 'Rome wasn't built in a day' - in fact they're still going and making an unholy mess !!

By . . . it's good to know you guys are out there - one spoon of reassurance does help this 'Mac medecine' go down.

Just a thought, when you are saving a downloaded file (my work sends a roster in a spreadsheet), can you go more than one layer deep when you are trying to save the file, or must you move it again later?

So far I can only 'reach' the root of a partition I created for MyDocs (wonder where I got THAT name).

Thanks again for all the help. This machine is SO tactile - I love touching it (don't go there!).

Well done designers.

I've now prepared a totally new Maxtor USB drive (280 Gb), let Disk Utility prepare it and get the same problem.

Disk Utility says the drive is fine, TM races off doing its thing and at about 1.8Gb copied STOPS and that's it. I've left it for several hours just in case the system is spooling something difficult, but that's it! It don't do what it says on the can.

The problems MUST be with the disks because my little 2.5" drive (110Gb) in a USB caddy, works fine.

Anyone else had this kind of problem, is it a setting? Or am I just unlucky - twice!?

Just a post script to anyone following this post regarding TM problems.

I've now managed to get one of the 300Gb drives to work. I went into XP (Parallels VM) and formatted the disk NTFS (I had been using FAT32).

I then let Disk Utility at it again - obviously to prepare the disk for TM. This time it worked.

It would appear that (unless something has got fixed in the process of re-formatting [I used Maxtor's MaxBlast utility]) it seems it has something to do with transition from NTFS rather than FAT32.

The only reason I mention it is in case anyone else is having this kind of problem.

Means I've got my 2.5" drive back again which is handy.

Topic closed as far as I'm concerned. Thanks all those who advised me - once more I've learned a lot.