[Mallrat]

My ibook was acting funny so I used Disk Utitly, Norton and Disk Warrior.

However, I don't think anything was wrong with my harddrive itself. But I ran Disk Warrior anyway and it rebuilt my harddrive.

But when I clicked rebuild, the message said it wasn't enough memory or free space. Free space I believe.

I didn't know what to do so I pressed cancel.

But does disk warrior fix things even without you rebuilding the directory?

and how do you get enough free space?

[maxintosh]

First of all, please throw Norton Utilities in the trash. No, I mean the whole box and CD, everything. It's trash and may very well do more harm than good.

Diskwarrior only fixes severe volume header problems without a rebuild I believe. You must be REALLY low on space if it doesn't have enough room to rebuild your directory. Throw out or back-up some big files (especially movies and unnecessary downloads) and then run it again. After it completes, reboot and run Disk Utility and repair your permissions.

[chezpaul]

Man, I don't get people who say to throw Norton out... I've used it for more than 10 years on more than 50 Macs and it has always saved me and has never broken a single mac. I would think that's a good average. So I can't help but think that people who broke their macs with Norton must not always know what they're doing.

I've never used Disk Warrior even though I own it (every version) cause norton (same here) has always done the job. I've been using Speed Disk once a month (or 2) on 20 macs for the past 4 years.

So what gives...


I'll admit that I haven't ran Norton 8 yet (even though I bought it). All my macs are OS X but I've read stuff about norton 7.. then again.. look at what I just read right above...

[bewebste]

The message you're probably seeing is saying that you don't have enough contiguous free space in order to do a fail safe directory replacement. Ordinarily, DiskWarrior will first write out the replacement directory, then only after it's in place will it delete the old directory. But, the directory needs to be located on a contiguous portion of the drive. You might have enough free space total on the drive, but it's scattered in small pieces through the drive, so it can't be used to hold the new directory.

In any case, you can either try getting rid of some files to free up disk space, or just go ahead and do a non-fail safe replacement. That means it will write the new directory directly over the old directory. If you have some hardware failure, a power outage, or something like that while the replacement is taking place, then your drive might get screwed up, with part of the old directory and part of the new directory being on the drive. The replacement only takes like 15-20 seconds though, so the chances of it going wrong are pretty low. I've done it several times and never had a problem.

[mikemako]

Originally posted by chezpaul:
Man, I don't get people who say to throw Norton out...

I'm with ya on that.. so many people seem to have problems with Norton, though. I had System Works for OS 9 & that worked very well.. I am about to upgrade to System Works 3.0 and I'm sure it will also be fine. Is there anyone else reading this thread who has NOT had problems with Norton applications? I'm curious how in the minority Chezpaul and I are.

[Mallrat]

After it completes, reboot and run Disk Utility and repair your permissions. [/B][/QUOTE]

I ran Disk Warrior and rebuilt my directory... it took 30 seconds and worked... then I repaired my permissions...

• what does that mean to repair permissions? What does it do?

[RayX]

Originally posted by Mallrat:
After it completes, reboot and run Disk Utility and repair your permissions.

I ran Disk Warrior and rebuilt my directory... it took 30 seconds and worked... then I repaired my permissions...

• what does that mean to repair permissions? What does it do?

All repair permissions does basically is restore the privileges of system files and directories to their default values.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by chezpaul:
Man, I don't get people who say to throw Norton out... I've used it for more than 10 years on more than 50 Macs and it has always saved me and has never broken a single mac. I would think that's a good average. So I can't help but think that people who broke their macs with Norton must not always know what they're doing.

I've never used Disk Warrior even though I own it (every version) cause norton (same here) has always done the job. I've been using Speed Disk once a month (or 2) on 20 macs for the past 4 years.

So what gives...


I'll admit that I haven't ran Norton 8 yet (even though I bought it). All my macs are OS X but I've read stuff about norton 7.. then again.. look at what I just read right above...

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, in the early days of OS X, I used to be foolish enough to use Norton's Speed Disk component to optimize my drive. I would use DiskWarrior to fix up the disk beforehand, and then use Speed Disk to optimize it. This all worked great until one day, Speed Disk wouldn't let me run it on a hard drive (which had been working perfectly fine), because it claimed there were B-Tree errors and that I had to run Norton Disk Doctor Kevorkian on it. I ran DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro, fsck, and Disk First Aid (in OS 9) on the drive and they all said it was fine. However, Speed Disk insisted that there were errors I had to "fix" with NDD. Although it was my policy never to run Norton Disk Doctor on a hard drive, I thought, "oh well, just one time probably won't hurt it." How wrong I was. To my horror, after "fixing" the problem, another one showed up that was exactly like it, and then another, and another...

[footnote: to the uninitiated, this is a common problem in NDD. It reports the same error thousands of times, when in reality there is no error. The error Norton is reporting comes from its incomplete understanding of the HFS+ format which causes it to think something is wrong with every file on your hard drive. What is the end result of this, you ask? Read on...]

To make a long story short, my disk was unmountable after Norton was finished with it. Norton's Undo feature did absolutely no good at all. The only option was to run DiskWarrior, which was able to make the disk mountable again and save all my data. However, it claimed that a lot of files were in unreachable portions of the directory. Basically, Norton had butchered the drive so that it was impossible to tell what folders a bunch of files were in.

To make a long story short, DiskWarrior recovered something on the order of 10,000 files to the "Recovered Files" folder. This included reams of OS X system files, Info.plist files from inside application bundles, the works. Norton had basically messed up my entire system, requiring that I reinstall the OS and all the apps on that drive. Boy, was I pissed. At least DiskWarrior was able to recover my data from the drive. But I still had to waste time reinstalling, which made me angry. And if I hadn't had DiskWarrior around, my data would just have been screwed...

Later, just for the heck of it, I tried running Norton on my other hard drive partitions, making sure not to let it "fix" anything this time! Guess what I found? Norton reported the same exact recurring error a thousand times for each of my drives! So at any time, I could destroy any of my partitions by running Norton on it. That was the last time I've ever run any Symantec product on my Mac...

[chezpaul]

Hey Charles, sorry about your drive. But my philosophy is to stick to one program. I only use Norton and don't mix it up with Diskwarrior (which I also own the latest version just in case but have never used).

I also would never use Speed Disk on a brand new system. I usually leave others the pleasures of discovering the dos and don'ts, then I jump in. for example I only used norton v 6.03 on my OS X systems and it's always worked like a charm. I always run Disk doctor then speed disk both from the disc itself.

I stayed away from Norton 7 because read too many wierd things about it. But I have bought and have already used (since my last post) on more than 10 systems, norton 8 and all seems fine here. It's a bit slow to boot and I might go back to version 6.03 just for that but it has never eaten up on of my drives.

In my experience, drives get eaten up by wrong doing or by not doing anything at all for too long or just because it was a bad drive.

That's my take.

I've never had to run Disk Warrior but I own it.. just in case.

Keep in mind that Disk Warrior does not defrag the drive like Speed Disk does. Their Optimizer still isn't out for OS X.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by chezpaul:
Hey Charles, sorry about your drive. But my philosophy is to stick to one program. I only use Norton and don't mix it up with Diskwarrior (which I also own the latest version just in case but have never used).

I also would never use Speed Disk on a brand new system. I usually leave others the pleasures of discovering the dos and don'ts, then I jump in. for example I only used norton v 6.03 on my OS X systems and it's always worked like a charm. I always run Disk doctor then speed disk both from the disc itself.

I stayed away from Norton 7 because read too many wierd things about it. But I have bought and have already used (since my last post) on more than 10 systems, norton 8 and all seems fine here. It's a bit slow to boot and I might go back to version 6.03 just for that but it has never eaten up on of my drives.

In my experience, drives get eaten up by wrong doing or by not doing anything at all for too long or just because it was a bad drive.

That's my take.

I've never had to run Disk Warrior but I own it.. just in case.

Keep in mind that Disk Warrior does not defrag the drive like Speed Disk does. Their Optimizer still isn't out for OS X.

I suppose that it's entirely possible that they could have fixed the issues with HFS+ in Norton 8. However, I don't trust Norton, and don't intend to find out.

The nicest thing about DiskWarrior is that lists all the repairs it's going to do before it does anything. It also allows you to preview the new directory before you actually replace it, so you know the drive is still going to mount and that your data is still going to be there after replacing. Norton, OTOH, "fixes" "errors" as it finds them. So if it's incorrectly diagnosing some normal aspect of the HFS+ file system as an error, and it's going to report the same error millions of times, you don't know that it's going to do this until you "fix" the first "error", thus initiating the damage.

Trust me, my story isn't the only one. Search the Internet, and you'll find lots of horror stories of people that have run Norton on an OS X disk in the HFS+ format. Unless they've fixed the issue in version 8 (which I doubt), it is only a matter of time until you will be sorry for using Norton.

[JellyBeen]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
I suppose that it's entirely possible that they could have fixed the issues with HFS+ in Norton 8. However, I don't trust Norton, and don't intend to find out.

The nicest thing about DiskWarrior is that lists all the repairs it's going to do before it does anything. It also allows you to preview the new directory before you actually replace it, so you know the drive is still going to mount and that your data is still going to be there after replacing. Norton, OTOH, "fixes" "errors" as it finds them. So if it's incorrectly diagnosing some normal aspect of the HFS+ file system as an error, and it's going to report the same error millions of times, you don't know that it's going to do this until you "fix" the first "error", thus initiating the damage.

Trust me, my story isn't the only one. Search the Internet, and you'll find lots of horror stories of people that have run Norton on an OS X disk in the HFS+ format. Unless they've fixed the issue in version 8 (which I doubt), it is only a matter of time until you will be sorry for using Norton.

I've had the same problems Charles had. I've been burnt too many times with Norton. Forget it!

[chezpaul]

I just don't get it...
I've read a lot of your stories but as I said... I DO deal with lots of macs and Norton has never failed.
I've used alone version 6.03 on over 20 macs for the last 2 years or whateevr it is, once every month or two...

Anyway...
I never really fear anything cause I'm always backed up anyway..