Cameron,
Once again, I must say it is useless to 95% of all users. This file does not exist on HDDs without Symantec software. I do not buy NIS (or the antivirus product) for any HDD 'benees'. This is a PC - PERSONAL computer and I do not want anything on it I do not NEED. Making it unremoveable is inexcusable!!!!!! You are completely biased as to the need and benefit of this.
Since I last posted here about how to delete this folder and file (which you can do as I described in an earlier note) and the drive works just fine! I have been experiementing with ExFat (on Windows 7) and have discovered it does not use storage properly in that it wastes a lot of disk space, not matter how I formated the HDD. The best I could get is 101 GB (may hundreds of files) of real size gets stored as (space actually allocated) 119 GB. This is the best results, and with formatting at 128K per cluster, the minimum allowed. As you increase this, the 'waste' becomes an ever larger percentage. So, I am still looking for a way to remove this Symantec excess and not lose disk space!
After closer inspection, the reason that disk space is lost with ExFat is that the smallest size per sector is 128K (windows 7). On Windows 8 for a 64GB flash drive the minimun formatting cluster size is 4K, but I did not do any testing (formatting) on Windows 8. So, formating the HDD in NTFS at 64K per cluster ended up with essentially the same lose percentage (101.8 GB to 118.1), so this loss is not due to the ExFat format, but rather with the size per cluster selected when formatting. The default size per cluster when formatting in NTFS format is 4K (4096) on my 1.5TB external USB drive, and this results in a small lose of disk space also (101.8GB vs.102.2GB).
Furthermore, I have discovered that exFat format was originally designed for flash drives, and consequently, it is available for any USB attached drive as seen above in my example of the Toshiba 1.5 USB 3.0 drive. This format option (xFat)does not appear when trying to format internal HDDs. BUT, with an outboard drive docking station, you can attach 'internal' drives thru a USB port to the computer and format it in exFat format anyway! This means any drive can be exFat formated. In additon, the cluster size when formatting is determined by the HDD size. So, in my example above on Windows 8, a 64GB flash drive can go as low as 56K per cluster, so difference is probably not an OS version differentce, but rather simply the storage size difference - 1 TB at a minimum of 128K) vs. 64GB (at a minimum of 4K). See support.microsoft.com\kb\140365 for a complete discussion on all formats for all Windows OSs, including exFat.
The bottom line after all this research is that Symantec needs to keep their mits off our hard drives!!!
Vincent 06-26-13