Re: Possible issue when migrating Office to a new system?

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Hi Peter:

Let me see if I have this right.... 1) Apple made the Machine, 2) Apple
made the Operating System, 3) Apple formatted the disk, 4) Apple made the
migration program, and 5) Because it doesn't work it's now *Microsoft's*
fault?

Yeah, you can quite see how that would occur, can't you? This is "Excuse
Number 1". I don't have a lot of patience with companies that try this
stuff. I suspect the Apple "Tech" you spoke to is a trained monkey who
happens to be a bit of an Apple religious fanboy. When he has completed his
training, he "may" understand that you cannot blame Microsoft for things
until the rest of the system is otherwise functioning :-)

Tell your Boss "Sorry, this is a case of infant mortality. It's quite
common in the modern computer industry, where nothing is ever tested until
it gets to the user."

What has happened is that the hard drives in the machine are probably
supplied to Apple with the OS Image already in place, striped onto the drive
at very high speed before the drive is assembled. After it had run for a
few hours, warmed up, then cooled down, the mechanical tolerances altered
slightly and in your case, you got unlucky. The information moved ever so
slightly with respect to the disk read-head, and it now can't read the disk
data properly.

The trained monkey is partly correct: you *will* have to reformat that disk.
I would also put it through a heat-soak test before returning it to service,
just to make sure it survives this time. To heat-soak it, place the
computer in an un-airconditioned room and work it hard (Rip twenty or 30
music CDs to iTunes...). Let it get nice and hot and keep it that way for
at least an hour. Then power it down and let it cool down overnight as cold
as you can get it (without putting it in the freezer!!). Then warm it up
again (you should have ripped most of your music collection by now...) and
make sure it doesn't fail. If it's still with you and there are no hard
disk errors in the system logs, you can give it back to your boss.

If there are hard disk errors (or you have not finished your whole music
collection) then further testing may be necessary :-)

The problem here is that the hard disk has failed, and Microsoft Office had
nothing to do with it :-)

When you DO come to rebuild her system, the reformat of the drive that you
will do will automatically wipe the Microsoft Office Test Drive which Apple
would have preloaded on the system. That's good, because otherwise we were
going to have to tell you to remove the test drive before trying to run the
Migration from her old machine. If you don't, the presence of the Test
Drive prevents the imported copy of Microsoft Office from correctly creating
its preferences, as a result of which, Microsoft Office will crash on
startup each time.

Hope this helps

--

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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:john@xxxxxxxxxxx

<peter.beal@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1178353910.838629.206630@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
About a week ago, my office received two brand new Quad-core MacPros.
Gorgeous pieces of machinery. I, being one of the only ones in our
office with any sort of professional Mac IT background (mainly just
setting up new machines for users and transferring their old files to
their new computer through a backup server) my boss allowed me to set
up her new computer. This is when the fun began.

I successfully partitioned and reinstalled Tiger onto the computer,
and installed all the necessary software. When it came time to
transfer the files, I used Apple's Migration Assistant, and copied
over using FireWire.

Everything was running and booting normally, as I had to reboot a few
times to allow for gradual software updates. I continued to set it up
in my boss' office and hook everything up. Still, no problems.

I come in to work the next day to be informed that my boss' main
partition has failed, and that we were being instructed by Apple's
support that:
1. This is a "common issue" when migrating Office onto a new system.
2. We must format the partition and reinstall Tiger.

Suffice to say that my boss was not happy with me.

Without going into much further detail, can anyone say for certain
that this was indeed a "Microsoft" problem? Was there any way we could
have successfully saved the data even though the partition had failed?

Thank you,
Peter



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