Disk Warrior is one of those solid old apps that works like a horse and does what it says it does: You must boot up to the Disk Warrior CD. Just pop the the CD into the CD slot on your machine; then go the Systerm Preferences/ Startup disk…and choose the Disk Warrior disk as your startup disk.
At this point, restart and wait, wait for it, wait some more….go to Starbucks for a quick latte….. I'm just making the point that the Disk Warrior disc takes a long time to actually boot up! On average, I'd say the wait is approx. 25 minutes. It's reading your wholes system, so no wonder!
From there, run the app as described in instruction booklet. Yes, it does everything it says it will do. Fast and dirty! You can choose from a menu of functions. The most radical and most life-saving thing it does is it reads whatever disk you want fixed, finds the error on the disk and then builds a brand-new copy of the disk, repaired to new condition, and literally REPLACES the old disk with the newly-created disk. Kind of amazing!
There is another app out there very similar, "Drive Genius" which only became as amazing as Disk Warrior in its most recent version. At this point the two apps are virtually identical, except that Drive Genius can now perform low-level drive disk repairs such as defrag, repair permissions, scan for errors, without the necessity of booting up to the the disk.
I believe the two apps are now very close in price - around $110 give-or-take.
If I had to pick one of these apps over the other, I'd pick Drive Genius, for its ease of use, wider menu of functions and more pleasant and user-friendly and pleasantly intuitive display.
Yes - it does what it claims to do. Sometimes very slowly - it can take many hours to rebuild an image of a disk with a damaged directory structure, but it almost always seems to get there in the end, and can recover disks that other recovery programs can't even see.
I've been using Disk Warrior from the earliest version 2. It worked fine until version 4 came out. It would slow down my mac and crash it so I had to reinstall OS X. After almost 4 years I have read all those "nice" reviews about this new update on version 5 and I purchased it again, which I regret now very much. Although, I have to say that It didn't crash my macs like version 4 did, but it still slows them down more then twice. Before I run DW 5 on my macs, I've tested the speed of the drives with 'Blackmagic Disk Speed Test' (this is a simple softwere to test read and write speed of your hard drive) and after running Disk Warrior 5 the speed of my macs become twice or more slower then it was before. I will never ever buy anything from Alsoft and would never ever recomend it to anyone.
Has anyone used DiskWarrior? Does it do what it claims to do? What is your opinion of it? Is there an app better for repairing drives?
Thanks.
Disk Warrior was introduced as a 1-trick pony, what it did, rebuilding a drive's directory from scratch, it did well. Even DiskUtility, Apple's basic drive first aid doesn't do this. It's a great app that I needed only once, but it saved my stuff & was well worth the $$$. You can use the app to rebuild your drive's directory & tweak out some extra performance if desired. Since it let's the user try out the new directory before replacing it, that is a good feature.
I've been using Disk Warrior from the earliest version 2. It worked fine until version 4 came out. It would slow down my mac and crash it so I had to reinstall OS X. After almost 4 years I have read all those "nice" reviews about this new update on version 5 and I purchased it again, which I regret now very much. Although, I have to say that It didn't crash my macs like version 4 did, but it still slows them down more then twice. Before I run DW 5 on my macs, I've tested the speed of the drives with 'Blackmagic Disk Speed Test' (this is a simple softwere to test read and write speed of your hard drive) and after running Disk Warrior 5 the speed of my macs become twice or more slower then it was before. I will never ever buy anything from Alsoft and would never ever recomend it to anyone.
All those "nice" reviews are true. If you have problems that DiskWarrior has not repaired, then it is logical to suspect that your problem is one that DiskWarrior cannot repair. Among problems that DiskWarrior or any other software cannot repair is media damage.
Since Apple added journaling to HFS+ with the introduction of MacOS X 10.3 or so, routine maintenance has been virtually unnecessary. However, there may be occasional damage created by unexpected shutdowns due to power interruptions and such like. Following such events, running File System Check in Single User Mode will fix just about any conceivable file system issue:
Restart
Press [cmd] + [S] while OS X reboots.Your Mac will boot into a fullscreen CLI that assumes that you want to run File System Check (fsck). Follow the instructions on the screen.
If the file system has been completely repaired, then type exit as the command prompt. Else, rerun fsck.
After the exit command, fsck will clean up and return your computer to the OS X GUI.
Comments
Disk Warrior is one of those solid old apps that works like a horse and does what it says it does: You must boot up to the Disk Warrior CD. Just pop the the CD into the CD slot on your machine; then go the Systerm Preferences/ Startup disk…and choose the Disk Warrior disk as your startup disk.
At this point, restart and wait, wait for it, wait some more….go to Starbucks for a quick latte….. I'm just making the point that the Disk Warrior disc takes a long time to actually boot up! On average, I'd say the wait is approx. 25 minutes. It's reading your wholes system, so no wonder!
From there, run the app as described in instruction booklet. Yes, it does everything it says it will do. Fast and dirty! You can choose from a menu of functions. The most radical and most life-saving thing it does is it reads whatever disk you want fixed, finds the error on the disk and then builds a brand-new copy of the disk, repaired to new condition, and literally REPLACES the old disk with the newly-created disk. Kind of amazing!
There is another app out there very similar, "Drive Genius" which only became as amazing as Disk Warrior in its most recent version. At this point the two apps are virtually identical, except that Drive Genius can now perform low-level drive disk repairs such as defrag, repair permissions, scan for errors, without the necessity of booting up to the the disk.
I believe the two apps are now very close in price - around $110 give-or-take.
If I had to pick one of these apps over the other, I'd pick Drive Genius, for its ease of use, wider menu of functions and more pleasant and user-friendly and pleasantly intuitive display.
It's very good.
Yes - it does what it claims to do. Sometimes very slowly - it can take many hours to rebuild an image of a disk with a damaged directory structure, but it almost always seems to get there in the end, and can recover disks that other recovery programs can't even see.
A decent review here http://www.macworld.com/article/2884315/diskwarrior-5-review-the-most-essential-drive-maintenance-and-repair-tool-gets-even-better.html
Since Apple added journaling to HFS+ with the introduction of MacOS X 10.3 or so, routine maintenance has been virtually unnecessary. However, there may be occasional damage created by unexpected shutdowns due to power interruptions and such like. Following such events, running File System Check in Single User Mode will fix just about any conceivable file system issue: