Restored backup breaks MS Office.

[Kurt Lang]

Having a problem with Super Duper 2.1.1 under OS X 10.4.6.

I have two internal SATA drives. The original is partitioned in half. The other, added later, is a single volume. There are also two external FireWire 800 drives from OWC. Actually, I purchased the enclosures and installed my own drives. These are each broken into two volumes for various purposes. One one external, I have a minimal install of OS X with all of my disk utilities (Disk Warrior, Drive Genius, etc.). Mainly used to do maintenence and cloning of the other drives. The second external has a volume for near line backup of images for my work and my clone backup of the main internal drive on the other partition.

I started up to the minimal install of OS X on the 1st external drive. This to ensure the drive I was cloning was not in use as the boot volume. Don't know if it makes a difference to Super Duper to do this. Anyway, I then used the Smart Update option of the registered version to create the initial clone on the 2nd external drive.

Everything was fine. I could install any software for testing I wanted and after I was done playing around, I would boot to the minimal OS X install and Smart Update the clone on the second external back to the main drive. All would be back to the way it was and working perfectly.

Now the problem. If I startup to the cloned volume on the 2nd external, even if I don't do anything while on that drive and later do a Smart Update (or even a full copy) back to the main internal drive, all of the Office applications are broken. None will launch. I get the Microsoft Error Reporting box on all four apps. These are the only apps affected.

I've tried restoring the entire Office folder from a known good .dmg backup created with Disk Utility. This doesn't help. Neither does removing the entire Microsoft preferences folder, or its font caches.

I have a feeling this is Tiger related rather than Super Duper. The reason being is that I also tried the same procedures with Carbon Copy Cloner. As soon as I boot to the backup drive, then the main drive cannot be restored so Office works.

Any idea what's going on? Is there a particular file that needs to be removed in order to fix the issue?

Thanks.

[dnanian]

I've not seen this here, unfortunately -- I don't know why it would be any different between your two drives... what does it look like is crashing in the error log you receive?

[Kurt Lang]

Correction. Only Word and Entourage won't launch. Those are the two I normally use, so hadn't bothered to check PowerPoint and Excel.

I'm in the process of restoring an older Disk Utility .dmg file, which will be followed by doing a Smart Update from my backup volume. I'm hoping that'll straighten things out. I'll let you know. But I do know that they both said at the top something about BAD_EXEC.

Thanks for the response, Dave.

[Kurt Lang]

The initial reinstall of the old .dmg file fixed the Office apps. Upon restoring the image on the backup drive, they were broken again. The really dumb part is that if I startup to the backup volume, Word and Entourage work. But booting to the drive breaks its abiltiy to create a working clone back to the main drive.

Here's part of the crash logs from Word and Entourage.

Word

Error Signature:
Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS
Date/Time: 2006-05-31 16:53:43 -0500
Application Name: Microsoft Word
Application Version: 11.2.3.060202
Module Name: Microsoft_Office_2001Z
Module Version: 11.2.3.060202
Module Offset: 0x00013680
Extra app info: Reg=English Loc=0x0409

Thread 0 crashed:

Operating System Information
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4.6 (Build 8I127)
CPU: G5 (970), Number: 2, Speed: 2000 MHz
gestaltPhysicalRAMSize err = 0, result = 2047 MB
gestaltSystemVersion err = 0, result = 0x1046
Screen: 1600 x 1200, depth = 32, ltbr = 0, 0, 1200, 1600

Microsoft Application Information:
Error Reporting UUID: 358A20D8-629A-11DA-A677-000D93447764
Time from launch: 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds
Total errors on this client: 3

Entourage

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS
Date/Time: 2006-05-31 16:58:07 -0500
Application Name: Microsoft Entourage
Application Version: 11.2.3.060209
Module Name: Microsoft Entourage
Module Version: 11.2.3.060209
Module Offset: 0x00252b70
Extra app info: Reg=English Loc=0x0409

Thread 0 crashed:

Operating System Information
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4.6 (Build 8I127)
CPU: G5 (970), Number: 2, Speed: 2000 MHz
gestaltPhysicalRAMSize err = 0, result = 2047 MB
gestaltSystemVersion err = 0, result = 0x1046
Screen: 1600 x 1200, depth = 32, ltbr = 0, 0, 1200, 1600

Microsoft Application Information:
Error Reporting UUID: 358A20D8-629A-11DA-A677-000D93447764
Time from launch: 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds
Total errors on this client: 5

[dnanian]

OK: there's not much there, unfortunately, because the actual calls it's crashing in are missing. Do you have the actual traceback from thread 0?

[Kurt Lang]

Nuts! I thought I had saved the entire text for both crashes to another location. Didn't paste it all here because they greatly exceeded the allowed number of characters.

Well, I'm currently writing a new backup to my external. What I'll do tomorrow is first create a .dmg file with Super Duper to the other external so I have a backup that will (should) restore correctly. Then boot to my backup external (which I know will goof up Word and Entourage) and do a Smart Update to the main drive. From there, I'll get the entire text and send them to you as email attachments.

Thanks.

[dnanian]

Yeah -- send them into the support email address, rather than here in the Forums. I'll take a look, and you can post a summary here if you'd like when we're done in the "back room".