Norton AntiVirus Damaging to Mac OS 8.1 Disks

Symantec Tech Support has confirmed reports on MacFixIt of intermittent disk corruption relating to the use of Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh, though only under Mac OS 8.1 and only with normal HFS-formatted volumes. Currently, Symantec believes the problem is related to Norton AntiVirus Auto-Protect and SafeZone scanning and recommends that Mac OS 8.1 users disable SafeZone scanning until Symantec can come up with a solution. John Christopher, Data Recovery Engineer at DriveSavers, commented that the problem results in the disk catalog, extents, and a portion of the drive (anywhere from 25 MB to 100 MB) being overwritten with a pattern of F’s. His suggestion for data recovery was to try the UnErase utility with Norton Utilities for Macintosh and scan for file types associated with the applications you use. If that fails and you have no recent backup, John noted that DriveSavers has proprietary utilities that can often recover data when commercial utilities fail.