Stupid norton speed disk 6

solrac

solrac

Mac Ninja
Norton Speed Disk 6 says that it can analyze and optimize drives for OS X. So I downloaded the free Norton 6 trial which comes with Norton Disk Doctor and Norton Speed Disk.

I booted from my OS 9.1 install CD, and ran Norton from my external Firewire Drive. (To examine my internal laptop drive.) I ran Disk Doctor, and the drive was fine. I then ran Speed Disk, and I think I REALLY REALLY needed to do this. I have had my TiBook G4 for 6 months now and never have defragged the drive, and lately it has seemed really really slow.

So the disk became fully optimized. Cool. I restarted into OS X. Spinning cursor comes up like normal, then just a blue screen, mouse pointer, and no spinning cursor. Nothing happens. It's the blue screen of void.

I could restart with cmd-s and get the CLI, and I ran fsck -y and everything was fine. On reboot same thing. Blank blue screen. I don't get to the start up panel.

So I tried reinstalling 10.1 with my install CD. NO. No. No. NO. Cannot install 10.1. The destination disk is dimmed because it uses different languages. (I suspect this from the latest software update that gives you more languages.)

So ... I guess I'll try my 10.0 install disk.... sigh... but if it doesn't work... fuck

I have to back everything up and format the drive. At least it will still be optimized.

Fuck Norton.
 
1st, i would suggest rebooting from cd again and going in and seeing what might be wrong. this would be a good time to have another real diagnosis and repair utility. see this thread for more on that

funny how the use of norton often leads to business for its competition:(
 
Here is a good way to optimize a OSX partition. i did and had no trouble at all.

1.Restart from a os9 partition or a os9 CD with Norton utils 6

2.Run disk doctor on OSX. Fisk all problems.

3.Defrag OSX with speed disk. it works ok if you choose to optimize to osx profile.

4.Run Disk Warrior, and rebuild all directories

5.Restart OSX, and prebind everything. you can use Xoptimize for this

6.OSX now works great everything is fast, even in my iMac.

You need at least an hour to do it all, but it works.
 
After all the problems that we have using Norton Disk doctor and Speed Disk, I think it is time that Apple consider using another more reliable filesystem.
I've work in several different environment (Solaris, WinNT, Linux, Mac OS X), and I found out that the HFS+ is the least reliable from all those. Solaris UFS never have problems, NTFS does have some, but can be fixed easily, ext2/ext3 and reiserfs is good. But I've seen so many problem using HFS+ and Norton stuffs.
I've previously noticed that Apple is hiring someone for Filesystem programming stuff, I hope that they can do something. Maybe choosing the good BeFS as the main filesystem.
 
Mikejuni;
I was thinking the same thing.. BFS would be great.. Journaling, and I think its also autodefaging like ext2.

If not BFS, XFS would be good (from SGI, its Journaling and has file markers like ext2 to prevent fragmentation).

OSX does offer UFS (from BSD), but I hear carbon apps bitch a fit, and classic can't be used unless you create an HFS+ partition just for it.
 
Yeah I guess Norton sucks ass then

but I did not use a beta copy! This is the (demo version) of the FULL version of Norton 6!! Did they not ever have problems with Mac OS X? How could they release this garbage?

I'm done.... I backed up all my data, I formatted my drive (wrote zeros to it), then installed 9.1, 9.2.1, 9.2.2, then 10.1, then software updates.....

what a BITCH. Well my Mac OS X is much snappier now.

And everytime this happens I FORGET TO BACK SOMETHING UP. FUCK!!! This time I lost all my desktop pictures and my old OS 9 preferences (so serial surfer will be in the most recent list for a while now).

sigh......
 
I think that BeFS would be the most probable to be ported to Mac OS X.
Other filesystems (XFS, ext3) is a single fork filesystem. I don't quite know about reiserfs, which is very high performance in large number of small files, but they use a plugin architecture to do something like resource forks.
BeFS somehow supports attributes, which is like the type/creator code stuff in Finder, and because of the extended attributes, it is easier to store more metadata information that Mac OS needs.
Moreover, it is very high performance.
I really think that if Apple can, they should license the BeFS source from Palm and start hacking on it.
 
Something about norton also ...

I think they will have a hard time porting the norton utilities. OSX handles most I/O calls. If norton utilities tries to access low level IO calls, I think it will make OS X very unstable. And I wonder if OSX allows Norton utilities to do so.

Mac OS X have a small utility that checks for filesystem errors in "fsck_hfs". It is a very handy utility that can check and fix most hard disk problems. It cannot do a surface scan though, but I think that surface scan is not required all the time in modern hard disks. Surface scan is only useful when you feel that your hard disk is losing data and you want to make sure if hard disk defects are causing all the trouble.
 
metiure,
Your repair process is exactly the routine that I have been using for the past several months. Works out fine for me as well.
:D
 
Actually, it is, but not by huge orders of magnitude. Saves me about a half hour.
I do the format-and-reinstall routine every 6 months or so as well.
:)
 
I love Norton. Never have problems with it.

Speed Disk 6 DEMO and REAL are both ok. I made a bootable 9.1 CD with the demo on to get around the 30 day limit until I got the real one. It defrags OS X HDs just fine.

If you're having problems try this: it works too:

Use any other FireWire Mac to run Speed Disk for you. Connect your fragged Mac to it using Target Disk mode and defrag the HD over FireWire. I used an iMac to defreg my PowerBook G3 with OS X on it. It's quicker than using a CD and your desktop doesn't get re-arranged when the CD loads up in 800 x 600!!

I personally wouldn't use a Beta of a Disk Util. And wouldn't judge Norton for OS X until they release the real one. I'm sure it will be the best disk util for OS X when it is done.
 
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