As Mac owners, we’re fairly used to trusting our computers aren’t going to break down and lose our data. Bad things happen though. Time Machine helps mitigate loss by backing up your data. However, sometimes our data doesn’t get backed up depending on how new it is. When stuff hits the fan and you need to recover fast, tools like DiskWarrior are suddenly worth several times their cost.
Alsoft recently updated the disk repair software to version 4.1, including improved Leopard compatibility. As I’ve been running exclusively with Leopard, it felt good to get the safety net back. Yesterday, Alsoft finally released the CD updater for existing customers and I just had to download and test it out.
Like the previous updaters, the procedure is simple. It asks you to insert your existing disk, it grabs the disk image, updates the DiskWarrior application, then saves that disk image. It then asks you to insert a blank disk to burn to. A few minutes later, you have an updated disk. I had to try it out right then.
As I actually only wanted to spend a few minutes playing with it, that was a mistake. It took on my Mac Pro, well over 8 minutes to start off the disc (painful). Naturally, I had to graph the directory structure on my boot disk. 38% was out of order. I then started a rebuild. The gathering stage took about 5 minutes. I began to wonder if it was working as my hard drive remained fairly silent, but it came back. 26 million comparison tests later, the disk was rebuilt.
It’s probably placebo, but startup seemed smoother after.
Primary category: Troubleshooting
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