Here's my setup:
3 X airport extreme base stations, 1 main, 2 remotes on either side.
imac intel core2duo, parallels latest update (I think), XP service pack 2, bonjour for windows. Printer is a fax 2850 brother plugged into the imac usb port. Printer sharing enabled on the imac. I assume printing is going over the network.
Today, however for some weird reason the newly installed 3rd base station went offline, and as a result the imac above that it was feeding went off the network, so xp could not see the printer anymore. Instead of doing the normal thing you would expect and saying printer unresponsive or something like that, it just waited for like 3 minutes to print, then it didn't show the print dialogue from the app I was trying to print from. So, realising something was wrong i quit the app, shut down windows, and then noticed the network was off. I reset the main base station which picked up the new 3rd base station (I don't get that?), network came back on, but when I restarted windows, it was drawing the windows all wrong, showing windows that werent' there, and the data for the app I work in which is a hotel management system was absolutely screwey - windows was screwey also - and when starting parallels (I tried multiple restarts etc etc) it says parallels does not have a driver it needs to run - it wouldn't run - tried again it ran but when starting up windows checked the drive, that worked and it started up, the app had half the data there, then I restarted again, and this time, all the data was gone, there were also some messages from windows about the registry files being corrupted and that it had restored them from another file - windows fuzz I don't pay attention to it - I had to restore thankfully from a backup I had only recently made a few hours before (a complete clone) and windows boots ok, and the app runs ok. I think given the circumstances that what happened was that because the printer went offline, it crashed windows and windows being windows, it screwed up the data in windows instead of just saying ok this printer isn't here. Maybe I'm being rash there.... I'm not a windows fan I wish they made this software for the mac it runs so flawlesslly... but I digress... the mac is running fine, which makes me think it's not a hard drive issue - I mean a hardware issue with the hard drive in the imac, and the drop out of the network + the failed attempt to print and immediate corruption of data is definitely suspicious. but I don't know for sure. I really need to find out what caused this, solve the situation whatever way possible, as I need this to be 100% reliable.
Thanks in advance for any replies.
Miklos.
Last edited: Mar 12, 2007
