Tag Archives: goback

backup laptop disk … another norton goback problem

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer has a Toshiba M35X laptop with a failing lcd screen.

He’ll get a new laptop via his insurance, but he wants me to backup his data onto his 512MB usb drive.

I find that his “my Docs” holds about 10GB of data… ok: backup to dvd seems to be the way to go.

The way i usually do this is remove the laptop HDD, plug it into my main system, then copy all the data into a folder on my main HDD.

Then I shutdown, place the laptop HDD back into the laptop, and restart my main system, and do a copy of files from the hdd to dvd via nero.

However… this time, I cannot see the laptop hdd in windows explorer… The drive appears in the bios, even the disk management panel within the “computer management console” can see it (but oddly, it has no drive letter assigned to it… it just shows up as a 37 GB NTFS active (healthy) partition (online)… So why isn’t it mapped to a drive letter?

A quick search finds:

http://techrepublic.com.com/5206-6230-0.html;jsessionid=Mank5H0rCrfSPx43jr?forumID=101&threadID=221487&start=0

Basically Norton goback is the cause… so now i need to uninstall goback, shuffle drives around some more, and I can finally backup the data…

Naturally, norton systemworks 2006 (and goback) will not uninstall itself (first it complains about liveupdate running… after I disable all services, i then get error 9999,172) … so off i go to download and run the norton removal tool… and after a very long uninstall, I can finally work on the drive from another pc.

Badly installed Norton Internet Security and GoBack (very slow PC)

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer calls saying since renewing NIS, her PC is running unbearably slow.

Looking at the PC, I notice a few strange things:

  • NIS is installed (but causing PC to run very slow)
  • An older version of NAV is also running
  • It looks like the older NAV is part of Norton Systemworks
  • During a reboot, it also looks like Norton GoBack is also running…

The user says that she just wanted NIS, but since she didn’t understand most “prompts”, she just said OK to all of them (that explains GoBack).

The first thing I try is uninstalling NAV and NIS in the official way (add-remove programs)… but it fails (after 20 minutes of waiting)… OK, time to get ruthless.

I disable all symantec tasks in the startup folder, registry, and services

I then reboot and I’m pleased to see the PC is now much faster.

I try to remove GoBack, but it also fails. So I lookup how to manually remove it (from the net)… It involves a few reboots, but I manage to disable it completely.

As an aside: why would I want to disable GoBack? Under some circumstances, it can cause a HUGE slowdown in your system performance. All it takes is something (that GoBack doesn’t recognise) to write to the disk quite intensely (eg a disk defrag program not recognised by goback).

I once had a problem with a huge slowdown a few weeks after installing GoBack… I didn’t know why… its just so easy to forget about GoBack once it is installed. Once I figured out what was going on, I removed GoBack and vowed never to use it again. If you like the idea of GoBack, then do a daily backup to a second physical disk instead… it works much better.

Anyway, I now manually remove NIS, Systemworks, and any other Symantec application. Everything seems to work well, but I’ve run out of time (customer doesn’t want to spend more than 2 hours worth).

Since she seems to have lost the NIS install file that she downloaded from the internet, I tell her she should download the file again, then try installing it again (and if she has any problems, to give me a call). This way I won’t spend up to 1 hour waiting for a download to complete, and another 30 Minutes installing and configuring NIS.