Alert! Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh: Readers confirm that it can corrupt your hard drive

Since posting our report yesterday, indicating that Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh (NAVM) may cause corruption of your hard drive, over two dozen readers have emailed us to confirm these problems (only two readers wrote to say they had successfully used NAVM). This level of response almost certainly indicates a widespread problem. I would beware of using NAVM until further details are known and/or a fix is issued.

Most readers reported symptoms similar to what Peter Holzberger reported; a few said their symptoms were more like those reported by Larry Yager. In either case, the reported damage was often difficult to fix and, in several cases, people had to resort to reformatting their hard drives.

What Symantec is saying I have contacted Symantec for further information and am waiting for a reply. Meanwhile:

Ronald Gold writes: "On looking up the NAV 5.0 newsgroup at the Symantec web site, I read that this problem had been reported several times during beta testing, but apparently the so-called final version was released without the problem being fixed. Symantec says they are working on it."

Jason Ferenczy-Zumpano writes that Symantec told him that "they currently think it is a problem with Mac OS 8.1, PC Exchange, and the June Definitions file. They have been able to duplicate the problem on their computers, and there doesn't seem to be a problem when one of these elements is not involved."

Possible work-arounds Aside from simply not using NAVM, suggested solutions were few. No common threads have emerged, so consider these suggestions as tentative:

Gregory Smith stated that when he disabled NAVM's Universal SafeZone option, the problem disappeared.

Fernando Alves wrote that turning off the NAVM Protection extension seemed to eliminate the problem. "But in an interesting twist, in my experience, this corruption only happens on HFS disks, not HFS Plus."

Another reader claimed that zapping the PRAM helped.

Neil Max found that Disk First Aid 7.2.4 (but not the Mac OS 8.1 version) fixed the problems caused by NAVM, even when other repair utilities failed.