hard drive surface error not fixed by norton: help

[Joseph Anderson]

Allright, guys. More from the dude who has had more hard drive pain in the last two weeks than in the rest of my life.

I now discover (in the course of testing all my drives in the wake of a catastrophic main drive failure) that my audio drive, where the original cuts of all my PTLE sessions live, has media errors on the disk surface. These were detected by Norton Disk doctor. However, when i tell it to fix the problem, it can't seem to do it. It balks, then hangs. I've tried to fix it several times with Norton, no joy.

OK so i got out the Disk Warrior. It rewote the directory tree no problem, all is well, except that even after that when i went to defrag the drive norton said it still had those surface errors and couldn't defrag. so here's the issue:

should i worry about this, as i mam prone to do?

should i move all my sessions to another drive as my primary source for keeping protools sessions, just to be safe, and use the problematic drive as a backup? is there even really a problem with the disk surface?

Help, please. I'd really like to get these hard drive woes behind me. . . .

[Slim Shady]

First off, NEVER use Norton Disk Utilities. It may work OK on a PC, but for macs it's a disaster waiting to happen. I've seen Norton severly mess up almost every drive it's been used on. You did the right thing getting Disk Warrior, but at this point, what I'd recommend is that you copy all the data from your audio drive to a backup source (DVD, external drive, etc.) and reformat your audio drive. Then copy your data back to that drive and give it a go. The way you explain it, it sounds like the drive wasn't acting funny previous to Norton saying it had errors, so it was probably fine. Just reformat and trash the Norton disk and you'll be fine.

[Joseph Anderson]

thanks a lot Slim Shady. I'll definitely do what you say, and I suspect you are dead right.

I am wondering if others out there share Slim's view on Norton. Never heard that before.

Joseph

[Lucky]

Some love it and some hate it. I have used Norton's since 1994 without a single problem. This is on about 7 of my own and more than 50 Macs at work. Never a single problem. I use Diskwarrior and Norton's virtually everyday. I have an old 5GB iPod that has OSX, Norton's and Diskwarrior on it. I can boot from the iPod and rebuild directories, check disks and optimize right from the iPod. First use Diskwarrior, then Disk Doctor, then Speed Disk then Diskwarrior again. It sounds like a hassle but the reason I do this is in response to a huge hard drive crash in 1994. I do this routine weekly on all of the Macs that I have charge of. Again, some people have had problems but I'm not sure if Norton is the true culprit or not.

If you think Norton is a problem don't use it. Diskwarrior is great. Also, Drive 10 and Tech Tool Pro HAVE hosed a few of my drives so I avoid Micromat's stuff like the plague. Others will tell you that TTP saved their drives. Find what works for you and stick with it.