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74 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you own a Mac, you should own this software., December 10, 2003
This review is from: Alsoft DiskWarrior for OS X (Macintosh) (CD-ROM)
Everybody uses their mac for different things, but this is one piece of software that should be on absolutely everyone's Mac. DiskWarrior is a great program that has helped me out of a jam a couple times. Once, in the middle of a project, my Mac locked up and then wouldn't let me log back in completely. Needless to say, I was a little concerned, since I had a deadline looming. I ran down to the local Apple store and paid too much (Amazon's price is great! Better than you'll get at Apple's stores!) and ran it, nervously thinking it'd never work. After a semi-slow boot to CD, the DiskWarrior interface came up and prompted me for my password. I entered it, clicked on "Rebuild", and prayed. In about 5 minutes, DiskWarrior had informed me that it had found errors and fixed them, and had rebuilt my directory. I half expected to lose some work or files, but I clicked on "Replace". Then I rebooted, crossing my fingers. It worked. And not only did it work, it worked wonderfully. My Mac had booted up faster than I remembered it booting. I logged in -- again, no problems, -- and was able to pick up exactly where I left off before the crash. DiskWarrior has given me some reassurance. It's not the safety net that a full drive backup is, but I don't need to worry about something going horribly awry.
And, it's more than just a disaster recovery application. You can schedule periodic tests of your drive(s), and it will alert you if anything has gone wrong. So, mine checks hourly and I have some additional peace of mind. Furthermore, you don't need to be a gearhead to get this to work. I don't want to spend hours making software work, and this is so simple and intuitive out of the box. It's great for infrequent maintenance, too. It will clean up directory structures that have gotten messed up, and everything seems to run a little smoother. Bear in mind that a lot of files seem to bog this down. It takes about five minutes to run a full test on my main hard drive, but my second storage drive, with less (but larger) files usually gets done in about a minute and a half. But, really, that's peanuts when you consider that you could spend all day reformatting and reinstalling, or recovering from a backup and redoing lost work. Alsoft has made a wonderful product and I don't regret anything -- except that I could have gotten it cheaper if I'd bought it through Amazon. If you own a Mac, you really should get this if you don't have it already. Its one success in my case more than paid for its cost, had I been forced to start from scratch.
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
DiskWarrior 3.0, October 8, 2003
This review is from: Alsoft DiskWarrior for OS X (Macintosh) (CD-ROM)
You know a programming team is good when you can take an application written for one environment (In this case Mac OS 9) and convert it to a completely new environment (Mac OS X) and still maintain the look and feel of the original application. That's the case with the new Alsoft Diskwarrior 3.0 (http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/). It's hard to believe they did a complete rewrite of the product when you compare the last Classic version to the OS X version. The software comes on a Bootable OS X Jaguar CD so it should be able to boot all the latest computers except the new G5's and PowerBooks manufactured since September 2003. The CD also contains DiskWarrior 2.1.1, which was the last of the Classic version. To run the application, just insert the CD into your CD-ROM drive, tell your Mac to restart and then hold down the 'C' key to boot off of the CD. Once the system has booted you will be presented with the DiskWarrior Main Window. Next you will select the drive you want to repair from the pop-down list box, and then click the Rebuild button. Then wait for the program to run its thorough test on the drive and discover everything it that's wrong with it. It will also at this time create an optimized directory for the hard drive. After the test are completed DiskWarrior will present you with a report showing all the things it found wrong and what it wants to do to correct them. The amazing thing about this program is it hasn't done anything to the hard drive until you approve and it keeps all of those changes in memory until then. This is a concept that I wish Symantec would take with Norton Disk Doctor. While Disk Doctor gives you an option to create an undo file, there are many times that if your running a repair from CD, you don't get an option to create an undo file (In other words if the only writeable drive you can write to is the one your repairing, why would you want to risk corrupting the drive your trying to fix). On my PowerBook and iBook it seemed to take a long time to run. While I can understand my PowerBook being a little slow (PowerBook Lombard/333Mhz/256MB RAM/10GB Hard Drive) I was kind of surprised that it took my iBook (Dual USB/500Mhz/384MB RAM/20GB Hard Drive) so long to run through its test. Just for kicks I ran a timed comparison of the previous version of DiskWarrior to the new version. When run on the same drive on the same machine, they actually came within 1 second of each other in completing the rebuild process. I believe that there could actually be a speed advantage to the new version if it didn't load a bunch of additional files during Step 8 of the directory rebuild. The most interesting thing that DiskWarrior found on both machines was the HFS Plus Disk Wrapper had a problem. This was a common issue when Mac OS 9 was released and I thought Apple had fixed the problem a long time ago. The reason I found this interesting was because the Classic version of DiskWarrior never reported this problem. One other thing that DiskWarrior allows you to do is to install it on your hard drive. Once you do this DiskWarrior will monitor your hard drive for any pending failures. This is important feature because currently OS X doesn't report any errors that come from SMART ATA hard drives. SMART ATA hard drives have the ability to monitor themselves and report a pending drive failure. This could be a critical feature because it might mean the difference between getting your data off the drive versus not getting it at all after failure has already happened. Things that I would like to see.
Although Alsoft has a product called DiskExpress Pro for disk optimization, it would be nice to see it added to the DiskWarrior product so they had a complete drive care package, especially at the price of $79.95. Pro's-Still fixes problems that Disk Doctor can't
Con's-Would be nice to see this as a complete drive care package
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31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Of the three main Mac utilities, this is the Bronze Choice, March 17, 2006
This review is from: Alsoft DiskWarrior for OS X (Macintosh) (CD-ROM)
Norton is dead as most you know. It will work on 10.2 or earlier but Norton SystemWorks does not work on any Mac OS after 10.2 very well. Norton had one thing going for it - it did a nice job of repairing B-tree catalog errors and directories - when things started going wonky, if you ran Norton, it would clear things up for a while. The other features might've worked well 5 years earlier but in the end (even though they updated them to run under OSX) were of dubious value - defragmentation, file recovery etc ... especially in the end when you no longer boot from the Norton CD, it was all rather useless and in case you hadn't noticed, the Norton UNINSTALLER only runs under OS9 so if your Mac can't boot OS9 (Classic), you can't remove all those invisible files they leave scattered around.
DRIVE GENIUS looks like the best replacement for Norton. I had a drive go down - it wouldn't mount but since APPLE's DISK ULTITY could "see" the drive, the drive was fine, it was just a matter of restoring the directory. DRIVE GENIUS was the only Mac utility that could recover the directory. My only complaint would be that under REPAIR, there are submenu choices - for some odd reason REPAIR did not repair it but REBUILD did. It would seem that users like us do not really care if you rebuild or repair - as long as you can get the directory fixed so it shows up as an HDD, all is good in the world, right?
In addition, you get other features such as DEFRAGMENT, DUPLICATE, SECTOR EDIT, SHRED, INTEGRITY CHECK, BENCHTEST & SCAN. Of course, Defrag, Duplicate and Shred are pretty obvious as to what they do. Sector Edit is for advanced users - you get to look at the underlying raw hex (?) of the data on the drive so if you feel comfortable doing that. Integrity Check & Scan seems to do the same thing in checking the underlying hardware of your HDD.
DRIVE GENIUS has a pretty nice user interface and you get a constant feedback on when it's doing repairs/rebuilding. That is an EXCELLENT feature. When you are wondering if your data is still intact, you want to know what the utility is doing. And you can boot off the CD - presumably not Intel Macs as it's 10.4
It is not perfect though. For drives that Apple recognizes as drives (you get the query if you want to initialize/eject or ignore) - I was able to get the directory fixed on an IDE USB drive but not an IDE Firewire drive so if you are in the same situation, you might need to plug it in as a USB drive versus in a firewire enclosure. But since it was actually able to see and repair the USB drive, I consider that a victory of sorts plus the the interface is much more re-assuring than the interface of TechTools Pro or DiskWarrior.
TECHTOOLS PRO is now much nicer looking and now feature laden. If you have a couple Macs and quite a few HDD's as I do, you'll most likely want to get it to have it handy to do some things that DRIVE GENIUS does not do. One advanatge is that it can actually test the hardware of your Mac including memory, cache, etc ... unfortunately, it still has the same old "feature" of the old TechTools in that it launches into the test mode as soon as you click on SUITES (what they call hardware tests if choose to do them altogether). For the unintiated, this can scare the crap out of you as when it gets to the video test, your screen changes color in rapid succession (at least it's faster than before) but it's still scary and disconcerting because they do NOT tell you it's about to happen! The other main choices are TESTS, PERFORMANCE, TOOLS & SAFETY. Tests is actually the hardware test that does not scare you. You actually have to press the start button before it races off to check your mac itself. PERFORMANCE lets you optomize the drive or fix directories. TOOLS is actually a nice addition - it is broken down into multiple parts: eDRIVE which lets you create a bootable partition. Aparently you can create this partition even if you haven't physically partitioned your main HDD - frankly, I'm a little too leery of messing with this feature to try it on my main HDD but good luck if you're brave enough. You can also create a duplicate on another HDD. In addition under TOOLS, you get DATA RECOVERY, WIPE DATA, AUDIO & VIDEO testing. The last choice is SAFETY which offers under it: PROTECTION SETUP which is nice as you can back up your directory info; DIAGNOSTICS SETUP which creates an auto schedule for checking up on your Mac & HDD; SMART SETUP for auto notification when your drive is about to have problems and ALERT so it can email you.
To be honest, I had bad experiences in using TechTool's (before it went Pro) in using to fix directories. Like other people, it seemed to have ended trashing most of my files so I can't vouch for its ability to repair anything but the diagnostics and early warning setup are unique to the Mac in one package so if you are really dependent on your Mac to start up & run everyday, it's probably worth getting the diagnostics and eDrive feature - when you actually have a directory problem though, you are probably better off running DRIVE GENIUS first.
One other nice feature of TECHTOOLS PRO is you actually get a printed manual. DRIVE GENIUS is a PDF - unless you print it out, not real useful when you can't access your Mac.
The third main Mac utility in this genre is: DISKWARRIOR. It's main feature is that it has the SMART warning system also to let you know when you might experience a HDD failure. It has some rudimentary repair/rebuild feature but I ran into two main problems. It's hard to tell exactly what it's attempting to do. The progress bar doesn't move very much but the main problem is EXACTLY what you do NOT want out of a utility ... It tells you there is directory problem but it could not fix it. Not what you want when the HDD does not mount. Since it doesn't less than DRIVE GENIUS with only about 30% of its features, you should get DRIVE GENIUS first - for critical users, they might also want to get TECHTOOLS PRO and of course, for those who have mission critical apps they must get to - it doesn't hurt to have DISKWARRIOR around.
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