Norton GoBack (Never Again!)

A client's computer crashed, they called us, we assured them that the hard drive could be conventionally recovered and that it was not physically damaged.  The problem arrived when Norton Goback would not allow Windows to boot, it just looped all day long with blue screens and error messages.  Never the less, I did what any other tech would do.  We slaved the drive to another working drive.  Xp recognized the drive, only to find it would not mount.  There were no options in the disk manager either.  For a little while I scratched my head and realized that something had to be blocking access to the drive.

Norton Goback, failing to do it's job masked the type of the hard drive to a hidden partition.  This really irritated me that Norton would play "god" like this.  Never the less, I spent a long time trying to find a safe work around. The last thing I wanted to do was loose the data.  No success until I found another guru that ran into the same pain.  There happens to be a special piece of software that allows you to safely change the master boot record disk type.  This software is a creation of Partition Magic which allows you to disconnect (unhook) Norton Goback from the hard disk and lets you gain access to the drive at least in a slaved situation.  My scenario, Windows XP was too far gone, so I had to copy the contents of the drive using a working operating system.

At the end of the day, I managed to get the data off and the my client stopped sweating bullets, knowing that his daughters school homework (finals) was on that system with no backup.

You can find out how to fix this problem by visiting pchell.com at this address: www.pchell.com

In conclusion.... Don't use Norton Goback Ever!!!!  You would be safer to use System Restore provided by Windows XP.