Dear Paragon Software: I hate you. (Or how HFS+ destroyed my OS X partition)

Title pretty much says it all, but here's the long version:

Bought Paragon HFS+ for $20 so I could write (not just read) to the OS X partition on the MacBook Air from Windows 7 / Bootcamp. I thought this was an insane price to pay (and later learned there's open source stuff to do the same thing apparently) but whatever, didn't want to bother repartitioning for space or copying over my files / keeping two different versions. Worked fine for a few days, then I boot back in to OS X and the machine takes forever. Very odd. Then I get a message about having no space on the boot drive and having to force quit applications with like 4 tabs open in Chrome. Odd, right? I go to restart, it won't boot OS X anymore.

I reset the PRAM and a few other things, still no dice. Suddenly the OS X partition doesn't even show up in the startup list if I hold the option key down. No worries, annoying but I'll just use the integrated repair software; I boot in to the restoration partition, choose the OS X partition, click repair... it fails immediately, tells me to save my files (how? it won't mount the partition to see them...) and delete, start over.

Problem: The last 2 weeks of my class notes do not exist anywhere else but on that partition. I need them. Yes, this is stupid and I'll be running DropBox all the goddamn time from now on. Learned my lesson. So I go in to a minor panic, but I'm not out of options yet, right? Not even close. It can't have screwed up the partition that badly, file recovery should be easy.

I boot in to Windows, start looking for software to fix the HFS+ partition from there. Found a few options, most with free trials, so I try them but most include their own HFS driver and this seems to conflict with the Paragon driver, causing bluescreens on install. Annoying. Sometimes I even have to boot in to Windows recovery mode and roll back to get a working install again. Only trouble is, /uninstalling/ the Paragon driver also causes bluescreens.

So this shit is broken, conflicts with the stuff I need to fix the partition, and uninstalling it causes the machine to crash and screws up my only remaining working OS to such a degree that it won't boot. Lovely.

I finally find mention of someone having success just booting in to safe mode and deleting all the HFS drivers from sys32/drivers, then uninstalling Paragon stuff. That works. Only, none of the software I got can fix the partition either.

Finally I get TestDisk and I think it's called PhotoRecover or something like that, free software, that pulls the files raw based on headers I'm assuming. Only problem is I now have about 300 ODT files, most of which are not my stuff but forms to fill out that come installed with Open Office, and they're all named fxxxxxxxxxxxxx instead of whatever they were, they're all saved to the same directory, and they all have the same creation date. Now I'm sorting through them with indexing / searching contents.

Thanks a lot Paragon. Thanks a whole goddamn lot. Last time I ever trust you to write software that isn't complete shit. (this is apparently a common issue)

I use Paragon so your issue is a bit disconcerting. I'm sorry for the issue that it has caused you. If you had a second machine, I would recommend removing the HD from your machine and seeing if your other Mac can read the information on the partition.

Are the files still in your Time Machine or did Paragon do something that messed with your backups too?

EDIT: derf. wrote "parallels" instead of "paragon"

silent-circuit said:

I reset the PRAM

Click to expand...

OS X still has this? LOL Can you rebuild the desktop???

**furious googling**

Command Option P R - still the same, lol.

No desktop rebuilding in OS X--that used to be the panacea when I supported desktops. People would load up their Macs with Christmas lights on their desktop and other crap and wonder why their computer was slow: "Rebuild your desktop".

Sorry, OT but I couldn't resist.

FWIW I tried the same thing and here I am typing from Boot camp as you are totally right - paragon HFS totally killed the OSX install.
I was only a week out on this one, so it's mostly just a hassle but damn.

I might be wrong but I thought that Apple provides write capabilities to HFS+ via Boot Camp. I haven't boot camped in a while but I could swear it was possible to write to your Mac drive from the WIn7 bootcamp without any additional software.

Can you load up the OS X install media / thumb drive and run OS X repair tools from there?

Don't even have the Macbook Air anymore. It died, guy at the Apple store was real nice but I don't live near there so in order to get it fixed, had to have it sent off to the main service center in Texas and shipped back to me (they don't do store to home shipping and I would have had to drive 3 hours each way to pick it back up). I get a call a few days later from Apple -- they're claiming there's water damage to the motherboard and battery. It never saw a drop of water, wasn't in rain, anything like that. They refuse to repair under warranty (I have 2 year extension on AppleCare but it is within the original 1 year warranty period) and say it will be $750 because the screen is also cracked. I told them I didn't want the screen repaired, I told the guy at the store this. They say that isn't an option. I told them to just ship it back. Now I have a fancy looking $1200 paperweight.

My first and last Apple product.

Bought a HP Elitebook. Perfectly happy.

I've heard that the liquid contact indicators can be finicky, that's really unfortunate.

I'm a bit concerned now as well as I use Paragon on my hackintosh dual boot to access files...

Next time, get MacDrive. sucks that it died though.

Scratch what I said. I was wrong.