Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[huwyngr Norton Fighter]

nikki

If you are in the USA Newgg is usally a good place to check out but I've also had good results with hard drives at my local Best Buy provided I know what I want and get someone to point to the shelves where they are, but do my best to avoid their "help" <g>

Unfortunately hard drive prices have shot up from loss of production due to flooding in the Far East and PATA drives are becoming more rare.

You may have difficulty in buying recovery disks from HP for a 7 year old machine -- was it XP or VISTA ? But if you can they should not be expensive -- I paid $20 including shipping for the last I bought.

I'm not sure whether the recovery disks made using their Recovery Manager put the recovery partition back in place or not when you use them -- they ought to as a restore to factory condition.

[nikki605 Super Contributor]

Bought a used Seagate HDD off eBay for $21 & change.  Same model/capacity as the one that went bad.  This one installed & passed all the SeaTools for DOS tests.  Loaded up the recovery CD I had burned & it recovered the OS perfectly, including the recovery partition (D:).

I spent several hours removing the HP factory bloat-ware and then used the 2004/2005 Norton uninstall tool to remove NAV 2004 (with lots of reboots in between & after).  Next I installed WinXP SP2 & SP3.  I logged into myNortonAccount and clicked on the "Download" button which started the install of NIS 2012, with my license key already included.  Worked great!  Ran Live Update a couple times and it is now at ver 19.2.0.10.  I manually ran most of the scans and all it found was 2 cookies.

As long as this HDD holds up, it looks like I'm in good shape.

I've just installed 117 MS updates, rebooted and now it shows 22 more.  Maybe by later today, I'll actually be able to start installing some applications.

Thanks for your help!!

[SUBASH_PRABU Symantec Employee]

Hi

   Glad to hear...All is well...

[huwyngr Norton Fighter]

Well done!

[nikki605 Super Contributor]

Scratch loading a PC has never been one of my favorite things to do, but being so familiar with WinXP, this hasn't been too bad so far.  I finally got all the Windows Updates done.  Now I can start loading apps like MS Office.

At this point, all of the NIS Tasks have run at least once, so it seems to be functioning normally.