[comp.sys.mac.apps] Norton Bug Alert

GHGAQA0@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be (Karl Pottie) (12/13/90)

This is something I discovered while working with the Mac of a friend.

My friend had just optimised his harddisk with speeddisk from Norton
utiltities. As an experiment, we tried to run Diskexpress 1.06, to
see if according to diskexpress, the disk was also completely
uptimised. But diskexpress gave the following error message:

'The directory of this volume appears to be damaged. More than one file
 owns the same block'

Norton SpeedDisk seemed to have ruined the harddisk. We ran HFS recover,
which also claimed that there were problems with the disk.

The Norton diskcheck program insisted that there was nothing wrong with
the disk.

We tried the same with my Mac, but on a soft partition. Same results



Can anybody else duplicate this Error ?

drew@objy.com (Drew Wade) (12/15/90)

I can't duplicate the bug cited above (speed disk resulting in two files
using same physical part of disk), but I have seen the following happen,
three times on two different macs:  QM Administrator (quickmail, CESoftware)
crashed.  I run Disk First Aid (Apple's program to check fsys structures
on disk, which i try to run after every crash...surprising how often
programs crash with files open and...trash some directory structure or
something), it reports something needs fixing (that's all it ever says,
never explains what), i say fix it.  I run Norton's Disk Doctor, it finds
a couple serious things wrong (volume bit map, and something blocks...i
wrote it down, but not with me now...), i say fix it.  I re-run disk first
aid, it reports problem (again!), i say fix it...


u get the idea?  Each program "fixes" something, which causes the other
program to see something wrong and "fix" it...they fight each other!  So, who's
right?  I called Norton and they seemed unknowledgeable and uninterested in help
ing.
Since Apple wrote the file system, i would tend to trust their file system
checker (disk first aid) in such a dispute...but bottom line:  i backed
up entire disk (daisy chained another hard disk), reformatted, and restored,
to be safe.  Then, of course, both disk first aid and norton agree that
disk is good.

Anyone else seen this?  Any ideas what it might be?

-- 
----
Drew Wade
drew@objy.com