F**king Norton

[nath]

Does anyone here have any experience with Norton 2008? Here's the dilemma:

I visited a client who was having very odd problems with her laptop - XP Home. Access denied for write/delete access on every part of her hard drive. I took it away and it turned out it was Norton 2k8's self protection option, with that disabled everything started working perfectly. Before returning it, I suggested to the client that I remove norton and install AVG as it's free, is less of a resource hog etc. etc.

Well, I've just uninstalled Norton, and after a successful uninstall it rebooted and it turns out that it's COMPLETELY wiped her profile. EVERYTHING is gone. Whats more, Windows is behaving very strangely and I can't access system restore or anything else. I've taken out the hard drive and it's currently in a USB caddy running through an undelete routine to see if I can get her data back. I was wondering if anyone had seen this before, and if there are any magical remedies I can use to sort it?

I'm hoping my undelete software will work, and if so I guess it's a case of reinstalling windows but if anyone has any pearls of wisdom I'll gladly hear them.

Thanks.

 

[WPKenny]

See if that particular product has a history of doing this and if so, raise it with Norton themselves and get them to cover the cost of a professional recovery.

 

[Jonty]

Hi nath

No pearls of wisdom, I'm afraid, but just one word of caution about undelete programs. The more the hard drive was used after the deletion occured, the more fragmented the deleted files will be. It's good you've removed the drive and are running the recovery via another machine, but be prepared for some of the lost files to be corrupt (the undelete utility should alert you to this).

Norton et al. has a pretty bad reputation around these parts, but even I'm surprised by this. I'd follow WPKenny's suggestion and get after them for some sort of relief. I dare say they'll try and dodge responsibility, so just be as polite and specific as you can (e.g. show why it had to be Norton which caused these problems, and emphasis all the personal data lost, and ask what they can do about it etc.).

Good luck!

Kind regards

 

[nath]

I ran through an undelete routine and it appeared to find all of the files that were deleted, however most of them said they had been overwritten, thus completely unrecoverable. What's very odd is that all I'd done was reboot after norton finished uninstalling. Once I saw everything was gone, I tried to get in to safe mode to confirm what was happening, then switched off and took out the hard drive. It seems very odd that so much data has been overwritten in that time.

Also, a lot of the data that the software claimed had a very good chance of being recovered was competely corrupt. Word docs with just junk in them etc. Is there any chance that if I try different recovery software it'd do a better job or is this just how it is?

Thanks

 

[WPKenny]

I've had good sucesses with GetDataBack in the past...

Data Recovery Software - Product Information

 

[nath]

Thanks Kenny - doing a pass with GetDataBack now to see if it has any more success. I doubt it'll make a difference, I think the data is just gone but it's definitely worth a try.

 

[nath]

Update: Tried getdataback and it seems to have found exactly the same data as the previous recovery software. Vast majority of the files are junk, and a select few are working ok.

I'm at the point where I need to reinstall windows - once that's done there'll be no chance for any further attempts at getting more data. Anyone have any ideas as to anything else I can try before I do this?