[madhatmark]

Hi

I have been having a huge amount of trouble with running Norton Disk Doctor and other Norton utilities and have in the process lost the ability to access one of my drives. Giving the message “drive not recognised do you want to initialise?” I have purchased Disk Warrior and have – thank God – been able to retrieve data on one drive but not the other, it looks like I shall have to send the drive away to a data recovery specialist which is going to cost me something in the region of £1,000. I would be interested to know if any other people out there have had the same problem and if anyone could help me salvage my other drive. If you can’t help but have had the same problems please let me know.

I run a G4 867DP 1Gb RAM, the drives in question are LaCie firewire (one 80Gb recovered and the other 120Gb) I usually run my software in 9.2

Both Drives in question are actually 95% backed up or are back ups so all is not lost but that 5% is still important!

Cheers
Mark

[Chuckit]

I avoid Symantec/Norton products like the plague precisely because I've heard of them doing things like this to drives. I really don't know of any surefire fix if DiskWarrior can't get to it. As a thought, have you taken a look at TechTool Pro? It's another program that claims to be able to perform data recovery. And they offer a $60 crossgrade for Norton users. So I reckon it might be worth a look before you go spending £1,000.

[Spheric Harlot]

All your problems will go away as soon as you thoroughly and entirely REMOVE ALL NORTON PRODUCTS from your computer, your office, and indeed your building.

Attach the software CD to a largish brick and send it to them, business return mail.

I am terribly sorry to hear about your disk, and I hope you will find another way about it.

Norton's chief application on OS X is to improperly fix problems it itself has caused. This is (fairly) widely known, but alas, far too many users still get suckered into installing it, based on the reputation the software suite once deservedly held, back when it was still Symantec Utilities for Macintosh - before Dr. Norton bought and broke it.

-s*

[Spheric Harlot]

Another possibility that I've heard success stories about:

Data Rescue

Try that.

-s*

[Randman]

Norton = problems. Why do you think the product was discontinued?

[The Placid Casual]

I avoid Norton products like the plague... thy have caused me untold hassle in thee past.

I would look for alternatives such as Drive 10 or Diskwarrior.

[madhatmark]

i realised they had discontinued the product but only after i had bought it. I am quite surprised as to the venom that people have towards this product and I would like to hear some more specific stories if at all possible. I have managed to salvage one drive with disk warrior. Can I ask if the other tools mentioned TT and Drive 10 would they be more likely to help reinstate my other drive than DW.

my email

[Chuckit]

Just so you know, Drive 10 is a less powerful version of TechTool by the same company, and it doesn't do data recovery, so it's certainly not preferable.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by madhatmark:
i realised they had discontinued the product but only after i had bought it. I am quite surprised as to the venom that people have towards this product and I would like to hear some more specific stories if at all possible.

Mine is similar.

I had a drive that started acting somewhat flaky. Norton found errors; I had it repair them. Disk Utility still found errors after that, but was unable to repair them. I ran Norton again - that again found errors and supposedly repaired them. Disk Utility finds unrepairable errors. Etc.

Then after using NU, the disk stopped mounting in the Finder. Then it wouldn't show up in Disk Utility.

Once I got Disk Warrior, the disk was repaired within three minutes, and has been performing perfectly for the past 18 months (I never reformatted).

-s*

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Norton & OS 9 and older
Norton % OS X