Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[xxJackxx Spyware Scolder]

This morning my laptop booted normally and then I noticed it was rebooting. First it wouldn't boot at all. Then I was able to get to safe mode and attempted to run a checkdisk. It would not run, it gave an error message. I finally got it to boot and though checkdisk said there were errors it still wouldn't run on my system drive. Then I started getting errors about corrupt MFT entries on files that started with LU (Live Update). NIS popped up messages that said it was corrupt. I was running version 11.5.0.125 with current updates as of last night. Uninstalling NIS allowed the checkdisk to complete. I'm not sure I can blame NIS or if it was a coincidence or a possible hardware problem. Is anyone else having a similar issue?

[BanMidou]

Did you do a system restore recently??

[xxJackxx Spyware Scolder]

No, not any recent system restores performed.. It worked normally last night and then this morning it was corrupt. It could be failing hardware but I wanted to see if others were having the issue. If not then I will assume hardware. Right now it seems to be ok since I removed NIS but I don't want to blame it wrongly. I'm not really worried about the drives being corrupt as I was going to replace them tonight anyway (new SSDs), but if it is a NIS issue I don't want to repeat it.

[AllenM Norton Fighter · Accepted solution]

Hi xxJackxx,

You mentioned having NIS version 11.5 but I assume you meant 18.5. The initial release of NIS 18.5 did have an issue which affected quite a few people which caused system instability, namely freezes of IE, etc.

However, NIS could not have caused the chkdsk errors that you describe. That is a very low level hardware thing which has nothing to do with any software. Apparently some of the files used by NIS were among those files which were corrupted.

Since that time have you run chkdsk /r on your system drive? Did it correct the issues? You can check Windows Application events to see what all chkdsk found and corrected.

Which OS do you have and is it 32 or 64 bit? More on checking Windows application events can be found at the following:

Windows XP: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308427

Windows Vista / Windows 7: type in the word "events" without the quotes in the start menu search box. Then click the + sign next to Windows Logs and then click on Application.

Scroll through the entries for the time frame in which the chkdsk was run. Any errors found and/or corrected will be shown there.

It is also very important to run another chkdsk /r to ensure no further errors are found. If chkdsk continues to find errors repeatedly then you have a failing hard drive and you should perform an image backup of your system drive ASAP with an imaging backup program like Norton Ghost or other.

Once you are sure your disk is clean and no further errors are found on chkdsk /r you can install NIS again using the link below. Note that this is for the English version, let us know if you need a different language.

www.norton.com/nis11

This will install version 18.1. Be sure to run live update repeatedly (rebooting as requested) until it reports there are no more updates. Reboot one last time at the end.

Also, if you have any other security software installed with a real-time component be sure to uninstall it first through control panel. You should also run a removal tool for the other software to ensure all remnants of it are gone before installing NIS again.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes.

Allen

[xxJackxx Spyware Scolder]

Yes, I meant 18.5. Typo. I am pretty sure it is an isolated incident since nobody else is posting with this issue. I am not going to blame NIS at this point, it was just that it seemd to be the only software that was corrupt, or at least the most obvious. There may still be other problems I have not yet found.

I am running Windows 7 x64. I've been all through the event logs and cannot find anything of interest. Checkdisk did finally complete after I got NIS removed and I have run it twice to be sure. I have backups of all of my data and this is not a major issue for me. I am running RAID 0 and fear one of the drives may be failing. Although it is running now (I am posting this from that machine) I am going to install my new drives tonight and start over with a clean installation.

Since this seems to be my issue alone I am going to consider this to not be a NIS problem and am done with this here. Thanks to all that replied.