565853 - Corrupting hard drive on Mac OSX 10.6.3

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Jonny Bravo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.22.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.5pre) Gecko/20100430 Thunderbird/3.1b2

Have used Beta1 and now Beta2 for almost a month. I have 7 Intel iMacs, some running Mail.app as for the last year and some now Thunderbird/Lanikai. I have noted that without updating or installing new software on all Macs, ones with Thunderbird develop Hard Drive corruption errors approximately once in 2-3 weeks of daily usage. After repairing HDD all goes as normal and then repeats again. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use daily during few weeks
2.Check disk using Disk Utility

Actual Results:  
Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Performing live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 4100713)
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume directory count
(It should be 99334 instead of 99335)
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Macintosh HD was found corrupt and needs to be repaired.
Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Start up your computer with another disk (such as your Mac OS X installation disc), and then use Disk Utility to repair this disk.

Expected Results:  
No corruption on the hard drive. Snow Leopard is very stable in this respect compared to Leopard.

Should not corrupt hard drive.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This doesn't quite sound like something Thunderbird could directly cause. So you're saying if you add thunderbird to a Mac that has never had thunderbird on, after 2-3 weeks the disk will corrupt? 

What is the symptom by which you recognize that you need to run Disk Utility?
And if you don't use Thunderbird on one of those systems for 2-3 weeks, you don't get the problem?

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

This would indeed be unexpected, as Thudnerbird is doing nothing special to the hard disk (it just reads and write files). A file might be damaged, but never the hard disk.

Make sure that you always stop the computer correctly, so that all applications are correctly stopped, and the operating system can write out all updates to disk before shutting down. Avoid a force quite or yanking the powercord (or USB if you have external harddisks).

Comment 3

[Jonny Bravo]

First I would like to mention that I am admin but not a developer. I have made my assumption on the basis of general observation within computers in my domain. I have experienced hdd corruption in the past when Macs were under Leopard, however we are running Snow Leopard on all machines since release and we never had disk corruption issues before start using TB.

I have faced with this on my MacBookAir and on two iMacs, latest this week. In both cases Mac would freeze completely when running so machine should be restarted and then corruption appears after test. However having this possibility in mind I have noted yesterday that my MacbookAir was running slow, so i did Disk Utility check again and posted corruption error that you have seen.

Comment 4

[Jonny Bravo]

We always stop applications correctly, although we close most of them including TB for the night, we never shut down computers. We do not run the system or any application on external disk.

Let me know if you want me to run some kind of test to provide my theory.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I'd guess, on a machine which has not had thunderbird on it
1. run a primo disk hardware test (whatever those might be but I'm not sure it's Check Disk)
2. install thunderbird
3. if you see a problem, run the disk hardware test again

other ideas?

BTW, thanks for testing betas and such

Comment 6

[Jay Moran (jaym/lazvon)]

Cannot confirm the original report. Using nightlies on 10.6.3 since 10.6.3 shipped.Have never seen any permission problems in Thunderbird directories... or in general in the past few months actually.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

now a year later :) ...

Jonny, what is your current situation ?
And, have you ever used version 2, and not had a problem?

Comment 8

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE due to lack of response to previous question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.