MP 7,1 Warning: Promise Utility completely destroyed my mac

[chfilm]

Disclaimer: the issue was resolved- promise Pegasus raid utility in its latest version is incompatible with adobe creative cloud software and causes MAJOR havoc!

now the report:

Well here we go with another fun story from the Adobe Experience!

Up until today my new mac pro was running absolutely fabulous, no problems whatsoever. Even this morning everything was fine, but at about 1pm, after I had exported a video from Premiere (deadline nearing tonight) I switched over to After Effects, when AFX was strangely reporting "not enough memory for the disk cache". Strange I thought, there are still 600 gb free on the allocated volume... when I wanted to launch Premiere the next time it wouldnt. It just said that it couldnt find any video drivers and I should install some. WTF I thought? I remembered a thread that was here on the forum about just that problem, but sadly it was never resolved.

I uninstalled Premiere and re-installed it, to no effect. I rebooted and then it worked again for once. A second attempt already failed again. Meanwhile I noticed that After Effects stopped displaying ANYTHING in the viewer. I wanted to switch render engines to software and back to metal, only to notice that it was ALREADY set to software (opposed to my usual settings) and greyed out, so I could do nothing. This was becoming strange fast.

Next I thought, hm maybe something messed up with permissions or so, so I checked the user folder and library, but all seemed good, diskutil first aid also didn't help. I then noticed when I wanted to uninstall after effects, that the Adobe CC app told me that it wasnt even installed. WTF.

I went to my time machine and tried to restore some Adobe folders deep in the library that have helped me in the past, but strangely suddenly time machine tells me that "the root folder doesn't exist" and asks me if it should create one. Now this was super weird, as the root folder wouldve been the library or my user folder.
I tried to manually copy over the files from the time machine disk, but it failed every time.

I finally resorted to use the Adobe CC cleaner utility and try to do a fresh install of the entire Adobe suite. Didnt change anything. I created a new user account and tried it there, but it also didnt work.

I was losing time quickly and my deadline came closer and I just couldnt work AT ALL because Premiere wouldnt launch and AFX wouldnt display anything. Note that ALL other apps worked fine at that point.

I tried something from the Adobe website, to boot with only one display attached and wow, suddenly Premiere launches again. I re-attached the 2nd display and it works still... launch AFX - no picture again. DAMN.
Rebooted a couple of times until suddenly, I am logged out of EVERY piece of software on my computer. Even the calibrated display profiles were reset suddenly. My adressbook was empty, all imessage conversations suddenly only showed numbers.

WHaaaaaat is going on? I tried a couple more things, then suddenly I couldn't "right click" anymore. only left click, no matter what I did, reconnected the mouse etc, no effect.

That was the point when I decided I had to wipe the entire machine if I hope to get any work done tomorrow at least. Clients were already upset, but what could I do, Adobe and Apple also have off on Sunday so I couldnt call them

I decided to restore the mac from time machine, and let it do its thing for 3 hours. Close to the end, An error tells me that restore failed. WTF!!!!

I then went to format the whole damn thing and installed Catalina fresh. Unbelievable.

Right now I'm installing everything from scratch and trying to figure out where Resolve stores it's keyboard shortcuts so that I maybe can recover those manually from the Time Machine backup.


What the hell was this? Did the Adobe suite kill my entire mac? Was I hacked? Did OSX coincidentally mess up some permissions all of a sudden? It came absolutely out of the blue, I installed nothing nor did I perform any updates or so. Really scary experience actually and thank god the clients could push the deadline one day. Now everything is back up and running...

If anyone has any ideas on what I experienced, it would be much appreciated.

 

[bsbeamer]

I decided to restore the mac from time machine, and let it do its thing for 3 hours. Close to the end, An error tells me that restore failed. WTF!!!!

According to this statement in the long post, your gripe should primarily be with Apple.

Standard practice: NEVER run install/uninstall or system level changes (even software and system updates) without having a current updated bootable clone at the ready. Can not recommend Carbon Copy Cloner enough.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

According to this statement in the long post, your gripe should primarily be with Apple.

Standard practice: NEVER run install/uninstall or system level changes (even software and system updates) without having a current updated bootable clone at the ready. Can not recommend Carbon Copy Cloner enough.

Sure, it's a best practice. But it's also a best practice to not make an OS or application suite that destroys people's data when they just try to use it like any normal person.

If we're laying out blame, the user comes in 3rd here.

 

[majus]

Based on what you wrote, my opinion is that you have a corrupted disk directory. Adobe did not cause that, nor Apple. There are third-party disk utilities that can usually fix it.

 

[zhpenn]

a bootable clone from ccc is a must

 

[Juicy Box]

Catalina

I wonder if Catalina was the issue, people are posting all sorts of problems with it on the MR forums.

It makes one wonder how many issues are going unreported....

Definitely not Apple's best work...

 

[OkiRun]

According to this statement in the long post, your gripe should primarily be with Apple.

Standard practice: NEVER run install/uninstall or system level changes (even software and system updates) without having a current updated bootable clone at the ready. Can not recommend Carbon Copy Cloner enough.

Why would this be a better option than Time Machine?

 

[nicho]

Why would this be a better option than Time Machine?

You can run the computer from the bootable clone, you cannot run it from Time Machine.

You can use the bootable clone to freeze the state of the computer before the changes (as you can in theory roll back to with time machine) but the difference is that you can load the clone within seconds not hours, and you can test that it works in advance.

 

[McCrab]

You can run the computer from the bootable clone, you cannot run it from Time Machine.

You can use the bootable clone to freeze the state of the computer before the changes (as you can in theory roll back to with time machine) but the difference is that you can load the clone within seconds not hours, and you can test that it works in advance.

√√√ CCC

 

[OkiRun]

Well here we go with another fun story from the Adobe Experience!

Up until today my new mac pro was running absolutely fabulous, no problems whatsoever. Even this morning everything was fine, but at about 1pm, after I had exported a video from Premiere (deadline nearing tonight) I switched over to After Effects, when AFX was strangely reporting "not enough memory for the disk cache". Strange I thought, there are still 600 gb free on the allocated volume... when I wanted to launch Premiere the next time it wouldnt. It just said that it couldnt find any video drivers and I should install some. WTF I thought? I remembered a thread that was here on the forum about just that problem, but sadly it was never resolved.

I uninstalled Premiere and re-installed it, to no effect. I rebooted and then it worked again for once. A second attempt already failed again. Meanwhile I noticed that After Effects stopped displaying ANYTHING in the viewer. I wanted to switch render engines to software and back to metal, only to notice that it was ALREADY set to software (opposed to my usual settings) and greyed out, so I could do nothing. This was becoming strange fast.

Next I thought, hm maybe something messed up with permissions or so, so I checked the user folder and library, but all seemed good, diskutil first aid also didn't help. I then noticed when I wanted to uninstall after effects, that the Adobe CC app told me that it wasnt even installed. WTF.

I went to my time machine and tried to restore some Adobe folders deep in the library that have helped me in the past, but strangely suddenly time machine tells me that "the root folder doesn't exist" and asks me if it should create one. Now this was super weird, as the root folder wouldve been the library or my user folder.
I tried to manually copy over the files from the time machine disk, but it failed every time.

I finally resorted to use the Adobe CC cleaner utility and try to do a fresh install of the entire Adobe suite. Didnt change anything. I created a new user account and tried it there, but it also didnt work.

I was losing time quickly and my deadline came closer and I just couldnt work AT ALL because Premiere wouldnt launch and AFX wouldnt display anything. Note that ALL other apps worked fine at that point.

I tried something from the Adobe website, to boot with only one display attached and wow, suddenly Premiere launches again. I re-attached the 2nd display and it works still... launch AFX - no picture again. DAMN.
Rebooted a couple of times until suddenly, I am logged out of EVERY piece of software on my computer. Even the calibrated display profiles were reset suddenly. My adressbook was empty, all imessage conversations suddenly only showed numbers.

WHaaaaaat is going on? I tried a couple more things, then suddenly I couldn't "right click" anymore. only left click, no matter what I did, reconnected the mouse etc, no effect.

That was the point when I decided I had to wipe the entire machine if I hope to get any work done tomorrow at least. Clients were already upset, but what could I do, Adobe and Apple also have off on Sunday so I couldnt call them

I decided to restore the mac from time machine, and let it do its thing for 3 hours. Close to the end, An error tells me that restore failed. WTF!!!!

I then went to format the whole damn thing and installed Catalina fresh. Unbelievable.

Right now I'm installing everything from scratch and trying to figure out where Resolve stores it's keyboard shortcuts so that I maybe can recover those manually from the Time Machine backup.


What the hell was this? Did the Adobe suite kill my entire mac? Was I hacked? Did OSX coincidentally mess up some permissions all of a sudden? It came absolutely out of the blue, I installed nothing nor did I perform any updates or so. Really scary experience actually and thank god the clients could push the deadline one day. Now everything is back up and running...

If anyone has any ideas on what I experienced, it would be much appreciated.

How goes it?

 

[HDFan]

Why would this be a better option than Time Machine?

A TM backup is much more likely than a CCC one to get corrupted.

 

[tommy chen]

Based on what you wrote, my opinion is that you have a corrupted disk directory. Adobe did not cause that, nor Apple. There are third-party disk utilities that can usually fix it.

no, there are no third-party utility than can repair an APFS disk like diskwarrior does it on HFS+ drives
and also apples diskutilitity can't repair the fsroot tree or filecount errors !
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A TM backup is much more likely than a CCC one to get corrupted.

i have seen many broken TM backups in my job and with catlina it is a horror

 

[chfilm]

no, there are no third-party utility than can repair an APFS disk like diskwarrior does it on HFS+ drives
and also apples diskutilitity can't repair the fsroot tree or filecount errors !
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i have seen many broken TM backups in my job and with catlina it is a horror

Actually I did have a CCC cloned copy of my old trashcan's harddrive laying around, but didnt think to boot from it duhh.

How do you CCC guys do it, as in how often are you creating a backup?
I NEVER ran into a situation like this before in my 15 years of mac usage, I would also suspect a foul play between Catalina and one of the Adobe apps it concerned only them. Sure, maybe not directly Adobe's fault, but still, super weird and scary. And especially also that the TM backup seemed to be corrupted somehow..

 

[Coyote2006]

Time Machine is great for data storage but NOT system storage. CCC is a great solution for sytsem backups (saved my life more than once). It's even worth buying a 2nd or even a 3rd disk only for CCC system backups. When i comes to big problems you know you never made a better investment.

Just reboot form the backup, clone to the corrupted boot drive, reboot from old system boot drive again, done.

 

[chfilm]

ARGH, it started happening again!!!
Premiere already gives me that same error of couldn't find a video driver and won't launch!!
How is this even possible? I did a blank install!
After Effects also started to act up a bit again, but still works as far as I can tell.. What is going on, and if it gets worse again, what should I do?

 

[zhpenn]

try to use the local TM snapshot to restore to a few hours ago backup

 

[bsbeamer]

Have you even considered contacting Adobe support if you believe it is their issue?

 

[ICBM]

I wonder if Catalina was the issue, people are posting all sorts of problems with it on the MR forums.

It makes one wonder how many issues are going unreported....

Definitely not Apple's best work...

Majority of people are having no issues like me. The few people who post issues here do not make up the majority of MacOS users worldwide.

 

[thomast0001]

ARGH, it started happening again!!!
Premiere already gives me that same error of couldn't find a video driver and won't launch!!
How is this even possible? I did a blank install!
After Effects also started to act up a bit again, but still works as far as I can tell.. What is going on, and if it gets worse again, what should I do?

Hmmmm. Thank you for reminding me why I have multiple disks installed internally so I can boot off alternate drives... So some questions. What disk are you using as your boot drive? Is it the Apple one or 3rd party, and what size? If 3rd party, what carrier card are you using? Also, if third party are you RAIDing disks? If so, what RAID software are you using, and what RAID level?

 

[Snow Tiger]

Well here we go with another fun story from the Adobe Experience!

Up until today my new mac pro was running absolutely fabulous, no problems whatsoever. Even this morning everything was fine, but at about 1pm, after I had exported a video from Premiere (deadline nearing tonight) I switched over to After Effects, when AFX was strangely reporting "not enough memory for the disk cache". Strange I thought, there are still 600 gb free on the allocated volume... when I wanted to launch Premiere the next time it wouldnt. It just said that it couldnt find any video drivers and I should install some. WTF I thought? I remembered a thread that was here on the forum about just that problem, but sadly it was never resolved.

I uninstalled Premiere and re-installed it, to no effect. I rebooted and then it worked again for once. A second attempt already failed again. Meanwhile I noticed that After Effects stopped displaying ANYTHING in the viewer. I wanted to switch render engines to software and back to metal, only to notice that it was ALREADY set to software (opposed to my usual settings) and greyed out, so I could do nothing. This was becoming strange fast.

Next I thought, hm maybe something messed up with permissions or so, so I checked the user folder and library, but all seemed good, diskutil first aid also didn't help. I then noticed when I wanted to uninstall after effects, that the Adobe CC app told me that it wasnt even installed. WTF.

I went to my time machine and tried to restore some Adobe folders deep in the library that have helped me in the past, but strangely suddenly time machine tells me that "the root folder doesn't exist" and asks me if it should create one. Now this was super weird, as the root folder wouldve been the library or my user folder.
I tried to manually copy over the files from the time machine disk, but it failed every time.

I finally resorted to use the Adobe CC cleaner utility and try to do a fresh install of the entire Adobe suite. Didnt change anything. I created a new user account and tried it there, but it also didnt work.

I was losing time quickly and my deadline came closer and I just couldnt work AT ALL because Premiere wouldnt launch and AFX wouldnt display anything. Note that ALL other apps worked fine at that point.

I tried something from the Adobe website, to boot with only one display attached and wow, suddenly Premiere launches again. I re-attached the 2nd display and it works still... launch AFX - no picture again. DAMN.
Rebooted a couple of times until suddenly, I am logged out of EVERY piece of software on my computer. Even the calibrated display profiles were reset suddenly. My adressbook was empty, all imessage conversations suddenly only showed numbers.

WHaaaaaat is going on? I tried a couple more things, then suddenly I couldn't "right click" anymore. only left click, no matter what I did, reconnected the mouse etc, no effect.

That was the point when I decided I had to wipe the entire machine if I hope to get any work done tomorrow at least. Clients were already upset, but what could I do, Adobe and Apple also have off on Sunday so I couldnt call them

I decided to restore the mac from time machine, and let it do its thing for 3 hours. Close to the end, An error tells me that restore failed. WTF!!!!

I then went to format the whole damn thing and installed Catalina fresh. Unbelievable.

Right now I'm installing everything from scratch and trying to figure out where Resolve stores it's keyboard shortcuts so that I maybe can recover those manually from the Time Machine backup.


What the hell was this? Did the Adobe suite kill my entire mac? Was I hacked? Did OSX coincidentally mess up some permissions all of a sudden? It came absolutely out of the blue, I installed nothing nor did I perform any updates or so. Really scary experience actually and thank god the clients could push the deadline one day. Now everything is back up and running...

If anyone has any ideas on what I experienced, it would be much appreciated.

Always perform a CCC clone of your boot drive before you take a new Mac into a production environment .

Always !!!

Here's how you do it : load the OS . load your apps . set your user preferences for all the apps . CCC clone this boot drive onto an external drive . Place clone drive in a safe place . Use Mac for work .

If you have a serious problem , just zero out your boot device and reverse CCC the clone image onto your Mac .

You could be up and running in like three hours doing work again , without worrying about tech support .

And never , never , never , place data onto a boot device . Never ! Always use other drives exclusively for your data for ease of archiving , recovery , etc .

A professional video editor taught me this . I'm a System Builder , so I don't edit very much .

 

[chfilm]

Have you even considered contacting Adobe support if you believe it is their issue?

Of course but it was sunday. I'm calling them now.
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Hmmmm. Thank you for reminding me why I have multiple disks installed internally so I can boot off alternate drives... So some questions. What disk are you using as your boot drive? Is it the Apple one or 3rd party, and what size? If 3rd party, what carrier card are you using? Also, if third party are you RAIDing disks? If so, what RAID software are you using, and what RAID level?

I just use the Apple standard 1 TB drive.
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Always perform a CCC clone of your boot drive before you take a new Mac into a production environment .

Always !!!

Here's how you do it : load the OS . load your apps . set your user preferences for all the apps . CCC clone this boot drive onto an external drive . Place clone drive in a safe place . Use Mac for work .

If you have a serious problem , just zero out your boot device and reverse CCC the clone image onto your Mac .

You could be up and running in like three hours doing work again , without worrying about tech support .

And never , never , never , place data onto a boot device . Never ! Always use other drives exclusively for your data for ease of archiving , recovery , etc .

A professional video editor taught me this . I'm a System Builder , so I don't edit very much .

Well, not sure if that wouldve helped me much right now, as the problem occured again now less than 12 hours after I wiped the entire system and started from scratch. There wasn't even time to do this CCC backup really.
Could this be related to the T2 chip being messed up or something?

 

[Snow Tiger]

Of course but it was sunday. I'm calling them now.
[automerge]1581345097[/automerge]

I just use the Apple standard 1 TB drive.
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Well, not sure if that wouldve helped me much right now, as the problem occured again now less than 12 hours after I wiped the entire system and started from scratch. There wasn't even time to do this CCC backup really.
Could this be related to the T2 chip being messed up or something?

Please tell us your entire current configuration of your Mac and include all connected hardware devices .

This could be something as simple as a failing cable causing electrical feedback or an USB hub sending an electrical signal that causes the instability .

 

[chfilm]

I'm in the waiting line with Adobe Support...
After effects stopped displaying anything again and Premiere won't launch with this video driver issue.
I restarted, now it's displaying stuff again, but in my comp, the video footage is displayed like this:

If I double click on the source video I can see something but it looks like this:


This is supposed to be a guy in front of a greenscreen, and now, it was not shot like this It looked normal this morning.

Can this really be a corrupted file system? This footage resides on an external drive. I purged all caches a thousand times already.

Maybe my Vega II is broken?

 

[bsbeamer]

You should get macOS Catalina installed clean and working flawlessly before proceeding with anything. Do NOT import settings or use data migration if you're running into issues.
Run CCC to Clone #1.

Install one app OR migrate data. Check system drive.

If everything works, run CCC to Clone #2.
If data migrate caused issue, restore clone #1 and install apps one at a time.

Install another app or update. Check all apps.

If all works, run CCC to Clone #3.

Cycle between clone #2 and #3 over the next few weeks.

ONLY ONCE EVERYTHING IS CONFIRMED WORKING for 7+ days, then update Clone #1 as your MASTER. Put it away and don't touch it unless there is an issue.

Cycle clones between #2 and #3 on whatever interval you choose. The system drive on workstations rarely changes that much in a crucial manner and for many a bi-weekly update between multiple sources if sufficient.

Backup your media data in another manner.

 

[flygbuss]

try to use the local TM snapshot to restore to a few hours ago backup

This!

Have you tried it? Snapshots are much faster to restore.