S.D. always fails with Mac OS 10.4.8

[danM]

I just can not get S.D. to work with Mac OS 10.4.8. on an Intel Mac Mini.

A full clone always stops when the blue progress band is about 75% of the way along to the end. The S.D. display just vanishes and the clone is incomplete.

I'm told there is a graphical problem which affects S.D. sometimes - but I always have the problem.

Has anyone any solution - otherwise Super Duper is unusable.


Dan.

[dnanian]

This is, unfortunately, a bug in 10.4.8 that's not SuperDuper! specific, and seems to be affecting some users. It's intermittent for most, but obviously not you.

We've reported it to Apple and are trying to come up with a workaround internally, too... I'm sorry for the frustration!

[danM]

While I accept the above - I was hoping some member might have found a solution, if indeed one is possible. Does any other forum member have similar trouble ?

dan

[dnanian]

The real solution, for now, is to go to 10.4.7 instead (if you're not using a Sandbox, you can archive-and-install to your base version and update to 10.4.7 with a download).

I realize this is frustrating and annoying; we're doing our best at this end to come up with a workaround.

(The problem seems to be with threaded access to window updates; our progress indicator is set to update on its own thread, and the "main thread" updates too. But Core Graphics -- which handles the low level updating -- looks to be having a new problem with locking, and crashes either the main thread or the progress indicator thread when there's contention...)

[danM]

I do hope you succeed. In the meantime I'm surprised that more users are not reporting the same trouble - is the type of Mac a factor, or is the problem
likely on any Mac running 10.4.8 ?

dan

[dnanian]

Honestly, I don't know -- it doesn't happen to me on any of my Macs, but it definitely seems to be Intel-specific.

[edalzell]

Originally Posted by dnanian

(The problem seems to be with threaded access to window updates; our progress indicator is set to update on its own thread, and the "main thread" updates too. But Core Graphics -- which handles the low level updating -- looks to be having a new problem with locking, and crashes either the main thread or the progress indicator thread when there's contention...)

I wonder if it has something to do with the shared video memory of MacBook? Have you noticed any commonality on the machines that they are being run on?

I have a MB so I will try a backup this week and let you know how it goes.

[dnanian]

It doesn't seem to have to do with that, Ed -- we've seen it on MacBook Pros, too, and they have a dedicated video card.