Re: [MAGNet] Serious errors reported with Norton AntiVirus for OS X: have you seen anything like this?

I question whether the problems were caused by Norton Antivirus. The
second problem ended up being "severe volume corruption and surface
damage to the hard drive." It seems more likely that Norton
discovered the problem, rather than caused it. Damaged files are
often not discovered until an antivirus program scans the hard drive.

Mical Wilson

At 11:55 AM -0700 9/21/05, Aron Roberts wrote:
> A campus computing support provider reported two serious issues,
>below, that they believe are related to the use of Norton AntiVirus
>(NAV) version 10 Corp for Mac OS X.
>
> Could you let me know right away if you've seen any significant
>issues with NAV, whether similar to the incidents reported below or
>of similar magnitude, regardless of their nature?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Aron Roberts
>Workstation Software Support Group
>
>>The first incident involved a problem with the "Live Update" virus
>>updating system. I attempted to update my system (iMac with OSX
>>10.3.9) with the latest virus definitions via Live Update, however
>>the program encountered a problem during the download stage. In
>>the approx. 20 minutes that Norton was running in the background,
>>it populated my /tmp directory with literally millions of lock
>>files, thereby consuming the remaining 75GB of free disk space on
>>my hard drive and generating a "disk full" error. As soon as I
>>identified the problem and deleted the errant files, I also removed
>>Norton from my computer, and have had no problems since.
>>The second, more serious incident, happened this past week as I was
>>performing a full disk virus scan on my supervisor's iBook (also
>>running OSX 10.3.9). Somewhere after 6 hours into the scan, the
>>program locked up and wouldn't respond to any user input. I was
>>unable to stop it, even using the "Force Quit" menu, and finally
>>had to resort to a hard restart, after which the computer would no
>>longer boot. Diagnostic software reveals that there is severe
>>volume corruption and surface damage to the hard drive. The damage
>>is so bad that the volume can't be mounted at all.
>
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Received on Thu Sep 22 16:10:30 2005