We recently received a 2010 MacBook Pro 15” unit in Waitsfield where the customer’s complaint was that she could not install Creative Suite 5.5. Launching the installer from the Adobe media resulted in a hard freeze of the unit after completion of about 20% of the installation process. The failure was easily replicated and consistent. After running numerous tests on the hardware to verify that the issue was not RAM or hard drive-based, we started troubleshooting the rest of the system by attempting an install of a fresh OS on an external boot volume.
This worked flawlessly and as expected. But is it still a hardware issue? A somewhat irksome problem seen in some unibody machines is failure of the SATA cable. This failure usually results in either false positives associated with failing hard drives or other I/O errors of the drive. To isolate this component we installed a known-good hard drive with a fresh OS install into the computer and again attempted to install the Creative Suite. Again, like on the external boot volume, the installation completed without issue.
Since the issue seemed not to be hardware related, after performing disk and permission repair, we again tried installing on the customer’s drive with her user account. With Console open, in order to view any errors, the installation progressed again to the point of a hard freeze, the entire unit becoming unresponsive and requiring a hard shutdown. The Console application recorded no hangs or issues in the logs regarding the install failure. We created a second Admin account on the unit and the freeze was once again replicated.
The next step was to erase the customer’s hard drive and install a fresh copy of the OS. After completion of the erase and install of the fresh OS, we were able to install Creative Suite on the machine without issue. Since we had done this on a ‘test’ account, it was thought the issue was resolved; no hardware was at the root of the problem. The customer picked up the machine and verified the functionality of the application and all seemed well.
The customer took her machine home and restored her data from a Time Machine backup. After reestablishing her account, she removed the test user account created by Small Dog. By removing that admin account, Creative Suite no longer functioned, as licensing was attached to the admin account used to install the app. Since the application had failed, she needed to once again reinstall Creative Suite. Once again, the installer crashed at the same point it had previously. We had still not discovered the true issue.
One of the applications that had been installed by the end User was Sophos Anti-Virus. The Sophos application did not like the Adobe Application Manager and installation routine. The owner of the machine disabled the Sophos software resulting in the ability to install the Suite without issue. In our attempts to install, neither Activity Monitor nor Console logged errors regarding the install nor did they show anything out of place in regards to the installation process.
Security of the Mac operating system is becoming more of an issue with new reports of Trojans coming out nearly monthly. The Mac community in the past has had, in general, an indifferent attitude towards anti-virus support. As more anti-virus applications are installed people, including us in service, will need to look closer at issues like this.
While we were not informed that Sophos was installed on the unit, it is often recognized that the installation of new software on a computer usually requires altering the anti-virus application settings. I would not call this a success as a repair as we did not completely solve the issue. However, knowing how silently some anti-virus software runs is knowledge we’ve gained to help resolve such an issue in the future!