Any Norton Utilities 2000 users out there?

[Lunac]

Hi everybody.

I was wondering if there were any Norton Utilities 2000 users out there? Symantec added support for drives over 20 GB in NU 2000. I have a 160GB hard drive (all partitions are under 80GB and are FAT32) and was wondering if disk utilities bundled in NU 2000 (DiskDoctor, SpeedDisk) worked properly on such a setup.

Also, I know that Windows 98SE was released in June 1999, and NU 2000 was released in August 1999, so it reasonable to think NU 2000 supports it. But, NU 2000 technical specs don't mention Win98SE, just Win98. (I know that NU 2000 dosent support WinME/Win2000/XP, or NTFS)

Anyone have any experience with this type of setup, or any ideas?

[alrichey]

Way back in the day this setup did work for us. You may have to patch Norton though after installing.

[Lunac]

alrichey, I appreciate your input.

Anyone else have more recent or more detailed experiences they could share? Anyone have any ideas?

[Dr. Mac]

Greetings!

Yes ... indeed ... I've had Norton Utilities 2000 installed on my Win98se for several years, and it works fine.

IN FACT (believe it or not) I had the previous version of NU (was it called "NU 99" ?) installed on my partners PC. She also had Win98se ... and the NU also worked absolutely perfectly!

I cannot answer your question about very large hard drives. By choice (yes ... read that again ... BY MY OWN CHOICE) I only have hard drives no bigger than 10Gb. (Why? ... that's another story! Mainly to do with speed, much easier to maintain etc) However, I cannot see any reason why NU 2000 should not work with larger drives.

Remember, you can always uninstall if you find it doesn't work for you. But I firmly believe it will. Personally, I wouldn't do without it. Excellent for doing a standard AND a full "Scandisk-type" routine in DOS (the best way to do it)

I do NOT have the program monitor running constantly in the background - that is the first thing I completely disable whenever I've installed NU on one of my PC's. I am quite intelligent enough to decide when I want to do a defrag, speed-disk, optimisation etc.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes ...

Dr. Mac

[Lunac]

Hello Dr. Mac.

I tried NU 2000 on my Win98SE setup few hours ago. Installation was smooth, but several utilities do not function and crash when I attempt to start them. Sadly both WinDoctor and DiskDoctor are among those utilities that do crash. Those were the utilities I was looking forward to using. Utilities that didn't crash included SpeedDisk, SystemInfo and several others. I did not test them fully though..

I tried updating, but apparently there were no updates. If I understood the press release mumblings on official Symantec web page correctly, anything released before 2003 is not supported anymore. Although, I fail to understand why they had to disable version updates completely.

Nevertheless, I tried installing several versions of LiveUpdate, including latest version 3.0 (October 2005), which reported I had no Symantec Products installed (?!), as well an older version (LiveUpdate 1.8, 2002), that reported all my Norton software properly, but updated none. LiveUpdate 1.8 reported all my software was already updated(?!) Hard to believe, considering I have the retail CD version of NU 2000 and most of the executables are dated June-August 1999.

Right now I am trying to find updates which I am absolutely sure existed at one time.

If anyone has any information I would appreciate any assistance.

[Dr. Mac]

Greetings Lunac

First of all, I have no idea WHY some of the NU 2000 programs are crashing.

????

One thing to try (if you have not already) is to turn that constant system monitor OFF (I already mentioned that above) It is called Norton System Doctor. It is a total pain in the arse (or, "a**" if you use American spelling!) Also make sure it does not automatically start every time you boot into Windows. Whenever I've had that enabled, I got crap!

SO ... turn the **** thing OFF! You don't need it to tell you when to do something ... you have enough savvy to decide when you are going to do your own disk cleaning, defragging etc.

Hopefully, all other programs should now work fine. The most useful I have found is the Defrag program (Speed Disk) - Norton Disk Doctor (like the Microsoft Scandisk) and finally the Norton System Check.

Note : System Check includes ALL the tests done by Norton WinDoctor, plus some extras. Therefore, you don't need to run WinDoctor.

Regarding LiveUpdate ... personally I wouldn't worry about that. Norton had been improving their Utilities program every year ... so when the NU 2000 version came out, it already had a lot of bug fixes etc. In fact, even after I had updated mine (that was a few years ago) when I then looked at version numbers of the main .exe files, most of them were still the same as the previous year's version!!! So, don't sweat about that. In fact, I came to the conclusion that the only real difference between the "'99" version and the 2000 version was purely cosmetic!

Symantec have pulled the same stunt with their CleanSweep program (which they took over from Quarter Deck software) I have installed three different versions over the years, and they ALL work in precisely the same way. The ONLY difference have been a face-lift! Most of the main program makers pull this stunt every year because they know most men are like little boys with little toys ... and just HAVE to have "the latest" version of everything! Don't fall for it (unless you're rich!) Why do you think I've refused to "upgrade" (???) to the dreadful WinXP !

One other thing I always do (I'm not saying you have to do it ... but ... ) ... when I use those main programs listed above, I always first close down all running programs using Ctrl + Alt + Del. In this way, as few drivers and other things are going on at the same time as I do one of the main Utilities thingies.

Just a tip worth trying!

Good luck ... hope it works out for you.

Dr. Mac

[grizzlybear]

I use NU 2000 on Windows 98Se. In order to use the utilities on a large drive >137 GB, you must build batch files and tack on the /NOLBA switch to them.

ie: Start C:\Progra~1\Norton~1\Speedisk.exe /NOLBA

Edited April 18, 2007 by grizzlybear

[eidenk]

I can confirm the /NOLBA switch to work here. Best is to create a shortcut to Speed Disk with that argument. It is in the NU readme.txt anyway. As always if unsure, first test on disks whose data you can afford to lose.

If you just want to use the Norton 2000 diskutils (Image, Disk Doctor and Speed Disk) and not have the rest of it installed, do as follows :

Install NU. Then grab those files wherever they are on your disk :

IMAGE32.EXE

IMAGE32.HLP

N32DLIST.DLL

N32DLSTU.DLL

N32USERL.DLL

NDD32.EXE

NDD32.HLP

NDDENG.DLL

NUABOUT.DLL

NUMISC.DLL

NUSPLASH.DLL

S32DMAPL.DLL

S32EVNT1.DLL

S32FATL.DLL

S32GUIL.DLL

S32KRNLL.DLL

S32MAILL.DLL

S32NPTL.DLL

S32STAT.DLL

S32UTILL.DLL

SD32.EXE

SD32.HLP

SD32ENG.DLL

SD32VXD.VXD

SYMKRNLL.DLL

SYMKRNLL.VXD

TKKE16L.DLL

TKKE32L.DLL

Grab the NU readme.txt as well as there is good info in it.

Put those files in a folder of your choice and uninstall NU.

Then merge this reg file to your registry :

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Symantec]
"UserFrameSize"="100663296"

That's all you need. Nothing from Norton will run as background service, task or dll and the disk utilities are fully functionnal.

And you can delete the bitmap in NUSPLASH.DLL with Reshacker if you don't want to see the splashscreen.

I did not actually proceed like that. I did install NU on an OS in a virtual machine and I have transplanted the above onto my real system.

You can also grab the DOS files if you want, albeit I can't vouch for them as I haven't tested them. They are :

DISKEDIT.EXE

DISKEDIT.HLP

NDD.EXE

UNERASE.EXE

UNFORMAT.EXE

Edited April 18, 2007 by eidenk

[celtish]

Yes, I'm using NortonWorks2000 but only the CleanSweep part of it. The rest of it is just too meandering.

Before seeing this topic I had just opened a new thread on this subject. You can find it here:-

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=96020