mig7920@cec1.wustl.edu (Mark Israel Gross) (03/16/91)
I am curious to know whether anyone in netland has encountered similar problems that I am experiencing from Symantec's 5-mice rated software. After 3 telephone calls to their tech support department I am reformatting my HD 40 in an SE/30 with 5MB Ram for the second time within 12 hrs. With the "Quick Fix" program I am receiving an error message: Allocation map is invalid Directory is bad I have a little over 4 MB of free space on the hard drive. What concerns me is that as I begin to approach the limits of space on my drive if there is no agreement between the allocation map and the directory I will end up writing into important files. This brings to question the integrity of the drive. Yesterday when I spoke to Symantec I was told that I would have to reformat the drive if the Disk First Aid program did not resolve my problem. Disk First Aid reported that it could not verify the drive. On my own initiative I did a file and sector test available in the TuneUp tool. This reported that all my files and the drive seemed to be in working order. With Apple's HD SC Setup program I tested the drive and was told that the test was sucessful. I then prepared to do the radical action of taking my files off the suspicious drive and reinitialize. Of course this involved using Sum's awesomely slow BackUp program. I did forget to mention that I rebuilt the desktop and "snooped" around on a low-level basis trying to determine the problem. After reinitializing the drive the Disk First Aid program reported that the drive was fine and I slowly began to reinstall my software. First the System folder and then the Sum II folder followed by a full restore. At each point along the way I ran Quick Fix and did not receive any error messages. When all my software was reloaded I ran the disk fragmentation program. The Quick Fix still worked properly. I then got bold and ran the Optimization program. As per the manuals instructions I used a floppy with a sytem startup. You really don't need the manual as the program has its own safeguards built into it that requires that this tool be initiated from a different startup disk. Well the Quick Fix failed. This was at 6 AM after spending the entire evening on this ????@##$$% . I called Symantec this morning to inquire if there were any INITs that conflicted with their Optimization program. I was told no and that if I prepared a floppy with a "stripped" down minimum version of the system I should be able to go in with Quick Fix and resolve the problem. This Technician insisted that the System File (not folder as I questioned him on this) is adequated to start a Macintosh. Instead of inquiring what INITs I was using and making some sort of report I was assured that their software could not have caused the problem. I wondered yesterday and was confirmed by this answer today that these technicians are cleverly rehearsed in what answers they give to problems in an automaton fashion and don't get their hands dirty by having to play with the machine. I am new to Mac programming and am quite fond of the machine. But, I am not new to programming. I do know that "bugs" of this nature would not receive kudos i.e. "5 mice ratings" (which I assume is the highest) on other platforms. I appologize for the wasted bandwidth but if anyone has a solution please E-mail. If my product was not older than 30 days you can be sure that I would be returning it as a dissatisfied owner. Mark Gross mig7920@cec1.wustl.edu