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

At 4:05 PM -0700 9/22/05, Mical Wilson wrote:
>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.

   Thanks for your thoughts, Mical. They're similar to the conclusion
that we arrived at, as well.

   In a response to the support provider who originally reported this
issue, we replied:

> One of my colleagues suggested that, without at least driver-level
>knowledge of the specific drive mechanism used in that iBook, it
>would be extraordinarily difficult for any software to be capable of
>causing actual physical damage to a drive (such as surface damage to
>platters or controller failure), unless the drive was already close
>to failing on its own. They further suggested that perhaps drive
>activity generated by Norton AntiVirus or any other application
>happened to coincide with the failure event.
>
> A campus support provider also wrote to share a similar view:
>
>>[...] if the hard drive was already hosed and was nose-diving to a
>>miserable death, I wouldn't be surprised if the antivirus scan
>>would have trouble. I could even envision a situation where the
>>user had said "my computer is flaky and slow" (perhaps due to
>>unknown hard drive self-destruction), and then support ran the
>>antivirus scan...
>>
>>Anyway, I hope that these are not common incidents!

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group

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Received on Thu Sep 22 16:21:14 2005