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Mac OS X 10.4.2 (#11): Response from Symantec regarding Norton AntiVirus preventing FireWire drive unmounting; more
Response from Symantec regarding Norton AntiVirus preventing FireWire drive unmounting Yesterday we reported that in some cases, the "Auto-Protect" component of Norton AntiVirus (NAV) can prevent FireWire drives, and potentially other devices, from properly unmounting. The solution is to either use the "Disable Auto-Protect" option within Norton AntiVirus' preferences, or remove the utility entirely.
We've now received word from Symantec, the makers of Norton AntiVirus, indicating that the issue is under investigation, and offering some tips for dealing with the problem.
Symantec Product Manager Mike Romo told MacFixIt:
"Auto-Protect process may be getting in the way of unmounting drives. My QA team is looking at this, but from what I have found, all users need to do is try unmounting the drive again and, almost always, the drive will unmount. Uninstalling the application seems a bit severe, not to mention unsafe, given the workaround.
"Like I said, we are investigating this issue (we test with Firewire drives all the time, obviously) and will make changes if necessary."
Spotlight cannot find single asterisk filenames MacFixIt reader Scott Rose has discovered a problem where Spotlight cannot find files and folders containing a single asterisk (*).
Scott writes:
"We have a folder on an external FireWire drive that contains movies (and also contains subfolders with even more movies). Most of these are .mpg movies & .mov movies.
"We have denoted our favorite movies by ending their filenames with 1 asterisk, 2 asterisk, or 3 asterisks.
"For example:
- skateboard#20*.mpg
- skateboard#21*.mpg
- skateboard#22**.mpg
- skateboard#23***.mpg
"However, whenever we do a search for the asterisk symbol (by simply typing a * into the spotlight search field), Spotlight only finds the files that have more than one asterisk in their filename. Spotlight does not find any of the movie files that only have one asterisk in their filename."
Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.
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Some of those limitations still exist today, and it's not a bad idea to avoid special characters in your naming conventions. You can save a lot of headaches in transferring files (email or across networks, etc.) and in archiving, searching, etc.
Just a thought: What happens if the asterisk is preceded by a backslash ('\')? It wouldn't surprise me if Scott is running into some weird regular expression issue, since the asterisk is typically a wildcard when dealing with searches; escaping the asterisk with a backslash may resolve such an issue.
Type "*" into the Spotlight field
It works if you have a space before the first (or only) asterisk.
was, but it definitely has required me to ignore the cannot unmount message
and either wait a bit and it does unmount, or to eject the disk again. I get this
message with both an external FW drive and a FW Iomega Rev disc drive.
I deleted all references to NAV 10 and the unmounting problem is gone...
Thanks for the tip,
AJ
This was happening in 10.3.* or even earlier... I can remember that long ;) However I remember checking using terminal and using the command ps -aux to check what was holding the external drive from being unmounted and it was Norton AutoProtect checking the eternal drive. It appears that if you have copied a large amount of data to the external drive Norton will think this is new data that needs to checked which good and well intentioned. However it does take a long time for Norton to do this so when you want to unmount an external drive the drive doesn't because Norton is scanning the external disk. IMHO Symantec should scan disk faster but in Norton AV 10 you can set what type of disk to scan in Norton Auto-Protect Preferences. The people with this issue is to go to the Symantec Menu bar and temporary disable AutoProtect and then unmount the drive and turn AutoProtect back on.
-->This was happening in 10.3.* or even earlier... I can remember that long ;)
Same here. LaCie Pocket drives on a Powerbook. It?s been happening for a very
long time and it?s somewhat intermittent (sometimes the drives dismount first
time, sometimes never).
Wow, I never understood why once in a while, when using Disk Utility to erase one of two external firewire drives (which I do every so often to refresh a backup that is incrementally added to ordinarily), the erase would fail due to a drive refusing to unmount. Now I realize this might be due to Norton AntiVirus. I have never had the unmount fail twice in a row, however.
- by elguapo August 2, 2005 1:16 PM PDT
- I am using a Powerbook G4, 1.5MHz, running 10.4.2. About a week after
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(10 Comments)upgrading to 10.4.2 my USB 2.0 port stopped working. Could not mount a
flash drive, an iPod, keyboard, mouse etc. When I tied to use the same devices
on the USB 1.0 port they all worked fine. Ran several hardware diagnostics and
the USB 2.0 seemed to be OK. Read about the problems with Norton anitvirus
and firewire devices so I disabled autoprotect and restarted. The USB 2.0 is back
to working. All of the above device now mount.