I hate Norton GOBack!

**RANT this is the worst piece of trash software I've had the misfortune of trying to troubleshoot ** RANT

customer calls me to say that his PC is in a reboot loop with norton GOBack. No biggie I think. Boy was I wrong.

First off there is no reason for this software on an XP machine with system restore but it came pre-installed.

I remove the drive and try to make an image of it before i start fooling with it. WinXP will not assign a drive letter. Disk manager sees the drive but will not assign a letter. Hmmm wierd I think. UNTIL i do some research and find out that GOBack messes with the MBR thus making it unrecognizable to windows.

Do some more research and the suggestion is to add/remove GOBack. Great. If i could get into windows I would but i cant.
Then they say to hit spacebar on the GOBack spalsh screen and disable GOBack. That gives an error and a reboot loop.
Next suggestion is to CREATE A WIN98 BOOT DISK (what year are we in?) and to load a program that will force GOBack to undo the changes that it made to the MBR and this may take SEVERAL HOURS!?!. I run this and still get the same error.
Try the same program with the option to force GOBack to uninstall. same error.
Talk to symantec and their suggestion is to WIPE the disk and REINSTALL the OS and GOBack (laughed at the suggestion of reinstalling GOBack). What about my data???? they say that the drive is most likley having problems and a re-install will fix it. If i need the data then I should talk to the HD manufacturer. You can imagine my internal reaction. I thanked them for theor time and ended the session.

wait **RANT ON AGAIN AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH RANT OFF** ok feel better.

what a piece of crap program.

if you want to get the data back go here http://www.quetek.com/ their program works very well and i have used it and love it because it will find stuff that you thought you deleted months ago and it even works on broken raid arays and for me it was well worth the $50 i spent on it

I'm not too concerned with getting the data back. I have a few programs that I use for data recovery that I can use. I just have to talk to the user to find out whats important. Doing a recovery on an 80gig drive really takes time. I just hate trashing a good install because of one crappy program. I also have a program that writes a generic windows MBR. Once i have his important data I'm going to try that.

nahmus said:

I also have a program that writes a generic windows MBR.

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If you do not mind telling, which program is that? It would have really came in handy when I killed my MBR during an ill fated dual boot with Suse.

orion25 said:

If you do not mind telling, which program is that? It would have really came in handy when I killed my MBR during an ill fated dual boot with Suse.

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I use a program called Micro Scope 2000 http://www.micro2000.com/microscope_suite/index.php

One of the options is to write a generic MBR. I bought it YEARS ago back when hard drive size were determined by their numbers. Back then the BIOS on compaq PC's could not be accessed unless you had a special floppy to boot from. this program let you access the bios directly. Other then that it has some really nice testing. Can test memory down to the chip on the module

I'll let you know if the MBR option works.

here is a free program that I found that will copy/save and write MBR's
http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

download hdhacker. Some other good utilities there as well.

Ugh I remember seeing this annoying program on boot on many computers (Norton Go Back has detected the times have changed, in order to continue working properly please allow us to take over the world kthx brb) rofl. Ugh Norton.......The sad thing is they pretty much have every company brainwashed on buying there software or give them kick backs to X amount you sell to customers blah I dispise them.

well I ended up installing a new copy of windows (customer did not have the original disk). Once windows was installed I used software to search the disk. I just got lucky and was able to recover the access DB that they needed.

I will be uninstalling goback from his other machines this week.

Well, IMHO, no Norton program should ever be allowed near any computer (the same holding true for much of software such as McAfee or SpySweeper that also seems to be the darling of the corporate world).

I am sure that many of us used to use at least one of those programs before we found out just what is really up with them.

In my case, it was Norton system works. A very buggy program that never tells you what it is finding on your system, what should be done about what it finds or anything like an indication of what it is actually going to do if you let it get away with the changes that it would like to do. And it is such a resource hog that your computer can lose half of its speed when the program is running.

I do have an occasional customer who actually does need spysweeper though. Even though it is a horrible program, it seems to stay on top of the crap that is out there. And this one person needs that simply because she thinks that she is supposed to click on every popup that she sees. Without a doubt, her computer was more corrupted than any that I have ever seen (that was actually capable of working in that state).

Malpine Walis said:

Well, IMHO, no Norton program should ever be allowed near any computer (the same holding true for much of software such as McAfee or SpySweeper that also seems to be the darling of the corporate world).

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we used to wrap alot of that software into the dysfunctionware category - it claims to work but it doesn't, it never has, it never will, it has no hope so it should be removed. i discovered the dangers of those "windows maintenance" programs with cybermedia's godawful cleansweep and oil change programs that came preloaded on my sony vaio. win98 ran so much better/faster after i removed that garbage.

the latest version of norton internet security mostly stays out of the way and seems alright. at the very least it doesn't constantly nag you to buy more products like mcafee does... i *almost* consider mcafee to be hostileware.

I was never a big fan of the "bundled suites" that are out now. Always hated norton's system works. I likes notron corporate AV. It was simple and fast. Now when you buy something it comes with 10 other products. The Mcafee suite is no better. I do like norton antispam better then Mcafee's

Personally I've gotten rid of nortons on all my machines (except my 2 servers. they have Norton corporate). For the past few years nortons have become very bloated. I use kaspersky and have recomended it to customers. It runs quicker, catches everything the other two do and its not such a burden on the system. I've also used their security suite (virus,firewall,spam,spyware) and It seems to be running fine. I've only used if for a few months, so my opinion might change but so far I'm off Mcafee/Nortons for good.

I just had a problem with go back as well. I did the same steps as you:

I remove the drive and try to make an image of it before i start fooling with it. WinXP will not assign a drive letter. Disk manager sees the drive but will not assign a letter. Hmmm wierd I think. UNTIL i do some research and find out that GOBack messes with the MBR thus making it unrecognizable to windows.

Do some more research and the suggestion is to add/remove GOBack. Great. If i could get into windows I would but i cant.
Then they say to hit spacebar on the GOBack spalsh screen and disable GOBack.

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Fortuneantly this did uninstall GOBack and I finally got into the data to save it. Oh, and the SMART said the drive was failing, so I had to rush this along and removing GOBack just added 3-4 hrs of time that this drive could have completely failed.

Yes, this is one of the worst progams ever!!!!

jiggamanjb said:

I just had a problem with go back as well. I did the same steps as you:



Fortuneantly this did uninstall GOBack and I finally got into the data to save it. Oh, and the SMART said the drive was failing, so I had to rush this along and removing GOBack just added 3-4 hrs of time that this drive could have completely failed.

Yes, this is one of the worst progams ever!!!!

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NICE SAVE!!!