Domain Name Com's Software ALSOFT DiskWarrior for OS X (Macintosh)

Software ALSOFT DiskWarrior for OS X (Macintosh)

Domain Name Com's - Software : ALSOFT DiskWarrior for OS X (Macintosh)

- Bad docs, Bad discs, Bad experience
I wish I could be one of those people giving DiskWarrior 5 stars and saying "it saved my keester!" Unfortunately, my case is more "I'm still hosed...and now I'm out a hundred bucks!"

The first annoyance was that the DiskWarrior CD itself has been reproduced so cheaply (blue dye, like a 10-cent blank CDR for home burning use) that my G4 wouldn't recognize it. "Yeah, those Phillips superdrives are touchy," says tech support. Mind you, the drive has never rejected any OTHER disc I've tried.

And despite the hundred dollar price tag, there are no printed docs with the disc - just a PDF manual. You know, the kind you could read IF your computer was working. Of course, if it was working you wouldn't need DiskWarrior, would you?

In the PDF manual, it says you can make an additional startup disc (in this case to boot into OS 9 instead of the default OS X)...but it doesn't say HOW to do this, or even hint at it. It's entirely unintuitive, and I needed two phonecalls to tech support AND considerable knowledge of Macs to make such a disc. Not that it helped.

Maybe my problem is more than just a bad directory - but I don't think so. So far, DiskWarrior hasn't accomplished anything. I'd call tech support for help, but they keep only banker's hours (M-F and out the door by 5 central). Considering the markup on this disc-without-manual, you'd think they could afford decent tech support.

I've heard enough good things about DiskWarrior to think it must be doing something for somebody. But for me, the program is overpriced, under documented and a waste of time.

***UPDATE January 2008***

I'm writing this as a followup to the comments above. When I finally needed to boot from the Diskwarrior disk, it didn't work. When I looked at it, the disc itself had completely decomposed in its case - the layers separating and unreadable. It looks like I mashed cottage cheese under it. Honestly, for 100 smackeroos you'd think that Alsoft might at least include an archival quality disk. Or, just maybe, a disk which would last more than a year. The irony of a "disk repair" utility that comes on a defective disk is almost funny.

But it gets worse. I repeatedly tried to reach Alsoft tech support, and finally got someone after about a week. I was told that I'd need to talk to SALES for a replacement disk. So I called Sales, and was told that "media" is guaranteed for only 90 days (!) and moreover that they didn't support version 3 anymore. My only option for the defective disk - an "upgrade" at their standard $50 price...though they'd toss in free shipping. In the end, I paid $100 for a program which was shipped on a defective disk, was REPLACED with a defective disk, and which cannot be replaced by the manufacturer. I'm appalled, pure and simple. I'm done with Alsoft forever.

Rating:

- Defective product
I bought it Diskwarrior 3.0 after reading several reviews, what they don't tell you is that 3.0 does not work with 10.3, and that after you get it, you will have to to call the company and pay an additional $20 for a working product (3.01).

Rating:

- If you own a Mac, you should own this software.
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.

Rating:

- Fricken Awesome
This software totally saved me.

I have an 80gb external fireware drive that wasnt playing nice. After running the apple utilities and Norton and getting nowhere, I was faced with some very unpleasant options.

It took three attempts to fix everything, but each time it got a little further than the last and picked up where it left off. It cranked for about three hours total and gave me a detailed report. I couldnt understand a word of it, but it looked extensive; pages long. The bottom line is that everything is working fine now.

I ran it on my powerbook afterwards. That machine had a clean bill from Norton, but Alsoft found thousands of things that needed fixing. It fixed and defragged for 12 hours and all sorts of little things run smoother now.

I really love this software. If you are totally f**ked, try it.

Rating:

- DiskWarrior 3.0
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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