Norton for NT & "Black Screen of Death"

One nagging gripe we had with our desktop publishing systems where I work at Dexter Sport Science is the lack of a defrag utility in NT. When you're working with huge print-quality files in Adobe Photoshop and Pagemaker, your drives tend to get fragmented quickly and slow performance down considerably, even on the Pentium II 400 Micron PCs we use with triple-figures of RAM.
So being a happy Mac user of Norton Utilities for many years and a happy Win 95/98 user of Norton in recent years, where else should we go for a defrag utility? Why not the best?
I wasn't even too surprised that the Win 95 version of Norton we had didn't work with NT. After all, NT is a vastly different OS from 95, and it was only $65 from CDW for the brand-new, just-released version of Norton for Win NT. With my vast faith in Norton, I didn't even consider the danger of buying a "brand-new, just-released version." (I should have listened to that nagging little voice, which whispered in my ear, "Can you say beta tester?")

So we bought and installed Norton for NT and happily defragged our disks. But the first time we launched Norton Disk Doctor, a series of three error messages appeared. On that occasion, my colleague and I both managed to cancel out of the error messages without harm, puzzled but not yet damaged.
The first message said: "Error on hard disk 1 - Inconsistent Disk Characteristics" The choices were three: yes, no, or cancel. Cancel seemed the least harmful, so we hit that one.
Up pops message number two: "Error on hard disk 1 - An extended partition is invalid". Same three choices, again we hit cancel.
Up pops error message three, this time only a caution, with only an OK button. We choose OK, as if there was any other choice, and go back to work, now happily defragged.
My colleague wisely opted not to allow Norton System Doctor to run in the background, but I, in my vast faith in Norton, decided to allow it to monitor. And therein may lie the rub.

A few days later, after a program crash or two -- Hey, NT ain't perfect, but at least it will survive a program crash -- up pops the now slightly familiar three Norton Disk Doctor error messages. But this time when I hit the cancel button twice and the OK button once, Doctor Norton informs me I must now restart to allow the good doctor to finish whatever it is he's doing. I don't want him to do anything to my hard drive, but I gotta restart sometime, so I do it now.
The blue screen of death in Win 95 is a regular occurrence. The blue screen of death in NT with its gobbledygook text dump it not as frequent and can be more serious, but usually is not fatal.
But what I'm seeing now is worse than either. Halfway through the reboot, NT quits and now I'm staring at the black screen of death. The ominous message is only two lines, "NT V.4.0 Hardware Detect" and "Detect Failed..." Those little three dots are the saddest part, as my OS fades out into nothingness.
Reboot all you want, that's all you get. Repair from NT setup won't repair. Emergency disk from NT won't reboot. NT setup won't even reinstall NT. It informs me my 6 gig hard drive has magically grown into 8 gigs. I have a new "unpartitioned" 2 gig drive first in line, a 2 gig c: drive which is "unformatted or damaged" and the entire 8 gigs is "unpartitioned." The only option NT setup allows me is to reformat my c: drive and start all over from scratch.
So I choose the only choice I have and begin reformatting at 11:30 a.m. After the Guinness World Book of Records' slowest reformat in the history of the civilized world, it finally finishes at 4:45 p.m., thankfully the same day it started.

During the world's longest reformat, I call Norton tech support. After a fairly short wait, believe it or else, a nice tech support lady answers. I hear her fingers flying over the keyboard as she types in my description of the problem and my lack of progress thus far. (Can you say beta tester again?)
Finally, nice tech support lady says, "Yes, we've had a lot of customers with that problem." The problem, she explains, is you're not supposed to hit "cancel" on the error messages, you're supposed to hit "no." Who knew? And even if you do hit cancel, it's not supposed to make any changes to your hard drive, she assures me. But in my case, it did. And in the case of "a lot of customers" it did. What is Symantec doing about it?
"We looked at our code, and it shouldn't be a problem if you choose cancel" she assures me. Sounds like a variation of the famous tech joke, "It's not a bug, it's a feature."... "It's not a problem, even if you hit cancel. But don't choose cancel next time, choose no." There ain't going to be no next time for me, nice lady.
One thing the nice tech support lady did tell me that was worthwhile. The name of the offending file is "nddeng.dll." Search that little sucker out and rename it, delete it, whatever, and no more error messages from the good doctor about your inconsistent hard drive characteristics.
Nice talking to you, nice tech support lady. Sorry you couldn't help me. Maybe you should tell the geeks to take another look at their code. The black screen of death is a problem.

Meanwhile, back at the office, the reformat finally reaches 100%. And now NT setup tells me, "Can't format the c: drive." It took five hours and 15 minutes to come that conclusion?
As a last stab, my colleague, Aaron Little, slaps a Win 95 boot disk in the drive and boots up to the c: prompt. He checks out the system in DOS and deletes the "unpartitioned" 2 gig active partition which has magically appeared, apparently created by Doctor Norton. Then he types "fdisk /mbr" to rewrite the master boot record.
He flips out the 95 boot disk and reboots and the miracle I've been praying for all day occurs.
Magically, my Win NT OS is back, boots up just fine, most programs still working and all files open up OK. I reinstall Photoshop and Pagemaker and those two problem children are ready to go back to work.
All's well that ends well? Just don't offer me Norton for NT. And if you are a Norton for NT user, remember if you get a hard drive error message, choose not only "no," but "Hell, no!"