Norton Utilities 4.0 Problem Reports Abound
The much-awaited release of Norton Utilities 4.0 may have come too soon. Numerous people (including TidBITS staff members) have experienced problems – some resulting in significant data loss – after using Norton Disk Doctor 4.0. The problems vary widely (see TidBITS Talk and MacFixIt for specifics), but we recommend that you uninstall system-level components of Norton Utilities 4.0 and avoid running Norton Disk Doctor, particularly if you use a third-party disk formatter. The most important thing you can do is to make sure you have multiple current backups – see our recent article series on backups.
If you wish to continue running Norton Utilities 4.0, download the 4.0.1 updater, along with a Norton Disk Doctor Special Edition that fits on a floppy and runs only if you boot from the Norton Utilities CD-ROM. (This is necessary because you can’t update the version of Norton Disk Doctor on the CD-ROM.) In addition, if you use Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh 5.0, make sure to get the Norton AntiVirus 5.0.2 update, which addresses potentially serious problems with Norton Utilities 4.0.