[comp.sys.ibm.pc] Info Needed on reported problem with NORTON SD program

malone@nprdc.arpa (John S. Malone) (01/26/89)

An earlier posting indicated that some users have had
problems with the Speed Disk (SD) program provided with
NORTON Utilities. I cannot locate that posting and today
I heard that several Zenith 248's had their hard disks
wiped out while using SD. I would like to verify that
there is in fact a problem with this utility, what
version(s) are involved, has it been fixed, what versions
are safe, does it affect only certain hardware
configurations (if so, please specify which), etc.
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	...             !ucsd!nprdc!malone

	... John Malone 
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kinmonthprep@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (01/29/89)

In article <1387@arctic.nprdc.arpa> malone@nprdc.arpa (John S. Malone) writes:
>An earlier posting indicated that some users have had
>problems with the Speed Disk (SD) program provided with
>NORTON Utilities. I cannot locate that posting and today
>I heard that several Zenith 248's had their hard disks
>wiped out while using SD. I would like to verify that
>there is in fact a problem with this utility, what
>version(s) are involved, has it been fixed, what versions
>are safe, does it affect only certain hardware
>configurations (if so, please specify which), etc.

I had a total wipe out using the Norton Disk Doctor. I have an ATT 6310
with one 23 meg partition for MSDOS, 46 megs for Xenix. I ran the
diagnostic mode of norton. It reported errors with the MSDOS partition.
I gave it an affirmative response, and in a matter of seconds it had
wiped out both the MSDOS and the Xenix partitions. Dead, totally stone
dead. Booting MSDOS from floppy did not help. There was nothing left to
save.

I'm back to using chkdsk and dog. The latter does a fine job. Twenty
bucks shareware.