Norton Speed Disk problems recently, after years of *no* problems

What in the holy heck gives with Symantec Corp lately, they could not
have done a better job of sabotoging the Mac platform if they tried!

Did Bill Gates buy them out?

Recently, trusting the latest incarnation of Norton's Speed Disk,
(big-mistake) - I set up a 4.00 GB partition for a stripped-down
Panther OS 10.3.2 install, about 1.6 GBs of files.

As usual with a fresh Panther install, the files were scattered all
over the relatively small 4.00 GB partition.

In the past, Norton Speed Disk had no problem whipping such a partition
into shape.

In the past, Speed Disk has _never_ bit me in years of using that
utility, it was one thing I trusted.

Before I defragged the small Panther partition, I made certain Panther
was running okay on it. I also ran DiskWarrior, Permission-Repair,
and Panther's "Repair-Disk" in the First-Aid tab of Panther's Disk
Utility - - - all three of these checks came up clean.

The newest version of Norton Speed Disk, version 8.0.2, apparently can
no longer tolerate what earlier versions could; it probably "needs" a
bunch of free space in the partition-being-defragged.

My first clue that all was not well should have been when Speed Disk
took only a fraction of a second to go through the
"Determining-Goal-State" step, an operation that normally takes about
30 seconds.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that Speed Disk version 8.0.2 completely
destroyed the new Panther install, even DiskWarrior could not bring it
back to life.

All this has my curiosity aroused. I will create a slightly larger
partition of 6.00 GBs instead of the previous 4.00 GB partition, just
in order to see if Norton Speed Disk version 8.0.2 destroys it again.

Mark-

P.S. - does anyone know if "Tech Tool 4" comes with a defrag util?
I want to get away from Norton's buggy stuff permanently.

P.P.S. - is there a good raw disk editor, as good as Norton's?
- - - pdisk, HexEdit, etc. are all lacking ease-of-use features that
Norton's "Disk Editor X" has. (in Norton's "Technical Tools" folder)
Disk Editor X is the only utility that has not been screwed up yet
by Symantec's programmers.