What Norton doth crash under, Drive 10 fixeth…

After a few days delay ostensibly caused by bad weather (though I’m unaware of any hurricanes or snowstorms in Texas at the time), UPS finally delivered my copy of Micromat’s Drive 10. For the first time since I’ve owned it, I now have the 160 GB Maxtor hard disk in my MDD G4 Power Mac fully optimized. (Norton Utilities 8.0, which I paid almost a hundred bucks for a month or so ago at Fry’s Electronics, would hang about half-way through the optimization and then crash the Mac with a kernel panic.) Drive 10 worked like a champ until the very, very end of the process (I saw the word “Finishing” displayed on the status window) when, like Norton, it crashed with a kernel panic. I immediately re-ran both the disk diagnostics and optimization. The disk diagnostics found no problems, and the optimization routine reported that it was “done” a soon as I ran it.

I’m not sure what’s causing the kernel panics when I run a disk utility. They haven’t occurred when I use the machine normally, and Apple’s hardware tests show no problems. (I’ve tried removing various memory modules and re-run Norton and it still crashed. Makes me suspect the hard disk.) We’ll see if the utility crashes the next time I run it on my Mirror Door Drive Power Mac. It’s done fine everywhere else (one Quicksilver Power Mac and one G4 iMac).

I love Drive 10’s interface. Look for a review of the product here within the next week.