Norton SpeedDisk Crashes…

I recently upgraded my copy of Norton Utilities for the Mac to version 8.0, the latest. My previous version was the one included in Norton Systemworks 1.0 for the Mac; and it required booting into OS 9, something that won’t work with my new Mirrored Door PowerMac. However, I’m finding that Norton Speed Disk continuously crashes with a kernel panic anytime I try to defragment the MDD’s primary hard disk, a 160GB Maxtor. It’s not clear to me whether the crashes are due to a bug in Speed Disk or some incompatibility with the 160GB hard disk. Speed Disk seems to run fine on all my other Mac’s, and the new MDD PowerMac is the only one with a hard disk bigger than 120GB.

Of course, as usual, I can find nothing on the Symantec website about this problem. I’ve run Apple Hardware Tests on the computer, and they are not finding anything unusual. Since I have not seen the machine crash with any other application I’ve been using on it, I must conclude that the problem is specific to Norton.

So, where do I go from here? Frankly, I’m going to try another disk management product. I’m leaning toward ordering MicroMat’s Drive 10 disk utility. If I do and it defragments my new Mac without a problem, more than likely I will have bought my last version of Norton Utilities for the Mac.