problem with symantec end point protection v.11

My problem right now is pretty much an isolated incident and searching through symantec's forums and other web related forums have led me to no fixes for my problem. Not sure if this is the right forum for this but since from what Ive seen there are many knowleadgeable people here I thought I would give it a shot.

I run a small network of computers in the office Im working in and we have a standalone machine that runs Windows XP Pro. Due to restraints put on us from higher up we have a standalone machine that runs up to date anti virus software that I bring over from a CD. This standalone machine has no network access with the other computers or an outside network, its purely used for verifying thumb drives and external drives are clean.

Problem:
I have an external drive that was brought to me from one of the guys I work with and when I plug it in to the computer I can read the contents and work with the contents but when I run a specific virus scan on the drive, Symantec starts the scan up but then comes back complete without scanning any of the drive contents. I know there was a virus on it when I first hooked it up but symantec found it and cleaned it by auto-protect being enabled.

Any solutions to this problem would be helpful. Thanks for your time.

 

Maybe I am being a bit of a dunce, but I am having a hard time understanding what your questions is....it sounds to me like you are saying you run a full scan, but it's not scanning---are you basing this on what, time it takes to scan? It comes back immediately so you think it did not scan?

I'm going to go out on a BIIIG limb here and say that nothing is wrong here.

Just for giggles, I downloaded the administrator guide and user guide of symantec end point....after my eyes stopped glazing over at the 700+ pages I started settling on a few key phrases, the one of most interest to us being Norton Insight.

Norton Insight is marketing phrase for a different way of scanning. Most Anti-virus programs people are familiar with actually read each file by actually opening it and closing it and moving on. This is a great way to review a file, but slow as a 75-year-old in the fast lane on the freeway.

Norton Insight works differently. After the initial manual scan--which you are doing, it indexes the file and assigns it a special hash (lack of better word)...now, as long as the file doesn't change, Norton only has to see if the hash hasn't change. If not, it doesn't open the file, and just passes it as trusted.

If you open a file, it needs to be rescanned, but otherwise, Norton just quickly skips all trusted files.

On your external drive, it scanned everything once, but on additional scans, it only needs to scan a file that has changed, so it will be a very fast scan. Plus, when you open and close a file from the drive on that computer, Norton is dynamically updating its records of the file--so only files that are changed, added when the external drive is not corrected need to be checked.

Even if you change 100 files, it shouldn't take Norton all that long to scan just those files....

Anyway, that is my supposition on skimming through the user manuals and marketing material in about 10 minutes.....