For those of you who don't know Symantec has released a beta version of Norton Disk Doctor (NDD) that allows you to fix a Mac OS X disk while running under Mac OS 9.x.x. I have found a slight problem with the NDD beta. It isn't really NDD's problem. It's really a problem with Apple's installer.
Open the directory /usr/lib in the list view. Make sure you can see the Date Modified and Date Created fields. Look at the file libkmodc++.a as an example. On my computer libkmodc++.a Date Modified and Date Created fields have the following values:
Date Modified is Wednesday, August 30, 2000
Date Created is Wednesday, October 18, 2000
As you can see the Date Modified is older than the Date Created. Most of the files on my Mac OS X drive have this problem. If you run NDD and have the "Check Files" preference turned on, NDD will prompt you to fix all bad modification dates. If you allow NDD to fix the all the files with the bad modification dates, you will see the problem I am about to describe below.
If you run ProjectBuilder and create a Carbon Application, then build it you will get link errors. Unfortunately, the information in the output log about the link errors is pretty vague. I was not able to figure out what the problem was until I set the Build log detail level to "Detailed Logs". This setting is found in the Preferences dialog on the "Building" panel. I relinked the program and this time the output told me that it could not link because two library files were out of date (it told me the name of the libraries, but I have forgotten the names). The build log miraculously told me that to fix the problem I should run ranlib on the libraries. You need to execute ranlib from the Unix command line. I ran ranlib on the two library files, then I relinked. This time the program linked without errors.
At this point, I wasn't entirely sure that by allowing NDD to fix the files with the bad modification dates, it had caused the problem described above. I booted back over to Mac OS 9.x.x ran the NDD beta over the Mac OS X disk again and this time I allowed NDD to change every file's modification it found out of sync. In the previous NDD check I had allowed NDD to fix only some of the files. I booted back over to Mac OS X performed a "Clean all targets" and did a build. Now I started getting warnings about the precompiled headers being out of date.
In summary, if you allow NDD to fix all of your modification dates on your Mac OS X disk, other problems will arise when you attempt to build programs under ProjectBuiler. This should only effect developers and should not have any impact on end users as far as I can tell.
[This message has been edited by thunter (edited 10-20-2000).]
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