Customer Reviews

Prosoft Drive Genius (Mac)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I've been a mac user for 10 years, and I've never been very impressed with Norton Utilities for Mac. They seem to treat the Apple platform as an afterthought. Although it does seem to have some useful features, especially Unerase, I don't feel it is as good as Drive Genius. In the area of defragmentation, there aren't a host of alternatives, and Drive Genius works very well. The only thing you have to be sure of is that you get version 1.1.1, because I got the previous version in the box, and with Panther or Tiger, it will not work properly. You can get the updated version from the website, but it's 102MB; so if you don't have a high-speed internet connection, you,ll grow a beard before you get the whole thing downloaded. And you must follow the directions on the website to create a bootable disc that you can use. But the program, works well, and I am very pleased, since I paid even more than what it's selling for now. The only other program I recommend besides this is DiskWarrior by Alsoft, to keep your directory optimized for best performance.

Drive Genius reminds me of years ago using Micromat's Techtool before they made it so hard to use and configure. It's simple, it's elegant, and it does the job.

Drive Genius will duplicate your volume or entire drive, checks the integrity of your hardware, repairs, rebuilds and verifies volume structures, and fixes permissions. It also adds, deletes, hides, shrinks or expands partitions, shreds files (DOD compliant!), defrags your hard drive, benchtests your system, and has an sector editor for expert users. Combine this with DiskWarrior and you probably don't need another repair utility.

Forget Norton (they've stopped supporting the Mac). And MicroMat's Techtool, while valuable, is a chore to use and configure. If you want to repair your Mac this is the one you want.

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.

This item is a gem and is very effective for Tiger users. However, you will find that the disk will not even boot if you have upgraded to a new Mac that uses the Intel Dual Core processor. Prosoft says that they are working on it and a new Universal version should be ready this Fall.

If you have just purchsed this for your MacBook, MacBook Pro, or any other Intel based Mac, don't expect that you will be able to use this out of the box because you can't.

A while ago, even though my Mac was working fine, I noticed that I couldn't repair permissions anymore and got the dreaded "error 9972" message by way of explanation. I therefore decided to purchase a drive repair and/or maintenance program. My local Apple store technician suggested Drive Genius instead of DiskWarrior, as that is what he used for day-to-day maintenance.

Drive Genius couldn't solve the problem. Oh, well, there was of course no certainty that it could... These programs are supposed to try, but there's never a guarantee of success. No biggie. I reformatted the drive just in case, zeroed everything, and reinstalled everything. Now that the machine was back to normal and that Apple's Disk Utility could repair permissions and see no fault with the drive, I decided to use the Duplicate function of Drive Genius to keep a clone of my drive, in case it acted up again in the future. It couldn't do it. Kept saying there was a problem with the drive, and it couldn't repair it. I tried to use other Drive Genius options to see if my drive had bad blocks. Couldn't get to the end of that test either. I ended up copying all my files by hand, one by one, without a glitch.

Now I could accept that my drive has somehow gone bad without presenting any symptoms, but Disk Utility sees nothing wrong with it. If there's indeed a problem with my computer it must be very minor, since it works fine and that its files can be handled, used and copied manually without trouble. Nevertheless, that intangible problem seems to be enough to halt Drive Genius in its tracks.

So as far as I'm concerned, Drive Genius has thus far proven to be an expensive and useless purchase. I should have gone with DiskWarrior for the 9972 fix, and trusted to Disk Utility for usual maintenance.

This may be a very good program, but I will never find out. The first task I chose to do when Drive Genius arrived was to defrag my hard drive. That one procedure rendered my computer all but useless--some programs would not launch, the time was off and could not be reset, saved email could not be retrieved, and other abnormalities. Prosoft's Support was unable to help me. I'm not sure that Drive Genius offers any advantage over Tech Tool Pro or Disk Warrior, or a combination of the two. If you get DG, back up before you defrag or, better yet, bypass that feature.

This product worked for me for a while with no problem, and seemed like a great utility. Then one day a drive with 40 gigs of movie files was running a little slow. After "verifying" and "repairing" and "rebuilding" the drive I clicked on defragment. The dialog comes up warning to backup data because loss of power during defragmenting could cause loss of data. As soon as I clicked OK, the program quit unexpectedly rendering the drive inaccessable and all data lost! I wish I had used DiskWarrior for the defrag, because it doesn't rewrite directory data until a few seconds at the very end the process. Only use this as a last resort. No other utility could rescue my drive. I can't even imagine if this had happened to my main startup drive with all my applications and pictures.

Drive Genius is what Norton wanted to be before they gave up the ghost. Aside from a few missing features, I am completely happy with Drive Genius. I would recommend this product to any Mac OSX user.

After reading other reviews, I was all set for Prosoft Drive Genius (PDG)to revolutionize the operating efficiency of my eMac. I had to call tech support just to learn how to begin using PDG. The help function is nothing more than a PDF file; "PDF" apparently means Pretty Darn Frustrating. The tech support rep was friendly and helpful, though, and I soon had PDG operating. The Repair function did not detect any problems. It took the Defragment a few hours to run. After the cleanup, I re-started the computer, anticipating a return of swift operating speeds and stability. Safari crashed immediately and the increase in speed was negligible.
In fairness, there may be other problems beyond the purview of PDG or maybe I just didn't figure out what function I needed to activate. At any rate, the software came up a bit short of my expectations.

It killed my harddrive and the only way to restart was to erase with entire computer with the OSX install disk. I was able to plug in a laptop so that the Intel iMac acted as a firewire drive and grab back a few essentials but I lost everything on my desktop and my emails.