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)

- Disappointed
I bought DiskWarrior based on several reviews and recommendations. Alsoft sells the product on a "no-preview, no-refund" policy and I soon found out why. Disk Warrior chugged away for about 16 hours without seeming to do anything. I called Alsoft tech support and was told just to let it keep running for a few days--but if it went for more than 2-3 days, then the disk was probably too damaged to save. Maybe I should have let it run, and maybe not, but I didn't have that kind of time, particularly since the software wasn't even letting me know what progress (if any) it was making. I did some more looking around and finally located a product called Data Rescue, made by ProSoft Engineering. This appears to be a similar product with three key differences: (1) You can download it free and scan your hard drive, and you only have to buy it if it finds files that you want to recover, (2) It shows you exactly how many blocks it has scanned, updated several times a minute (very helpful in the long periods when it was going slowly through severely damaged portions of my drive), and (3) it works faster than Disk Warrior, or at least did in my case, reading my drive in about 7 hours and finding thousands of recoverable files. I consider DiskWarrior a waste of $90.

Rating:

- PERFECT!!
I thought my iBook was toast, along with 5 years of family photos, iTunes downloads, art and writings I had done (for publications), etc. I tried rebooting, disk first aid, fsck, etc., but it looked like my laptop's hard drive was DOA.

Even my local Mac tech scratched his head and said there was nothing he could do for me except recommend an out-of-state co. that would physically rebuild my hard drive for about $2000, if I wanted all those memories back.

Being that I was short about $1900 of that, not to mention the additional pennies needed for a new computer, on a prayer I ordered DiskWarrior.

I stuck it in the drive, pressed 'C', and in 20 minutes, five years of my life came back on screen. I was floored.

It was so simple, even a non-techhead like me could do it.

Don't trash your Mac til you try this. It is a miracle worker. Even if all else has failed, this is worth a shot if your hard drive is fried.

Rating:

- Of the three main Mac utilities, this is the Bronze Choice
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.

Rating:

- Did NOT Recover Files
I'm giving this product 2 stars because I'm sure it's useful as a maintenance utility. However, I spent $100 on it to recover my data from a crashed hard drive, and it was useless. I ran the utility three separate times, each time taking over 24 hours, and it could not find a single file. I then purchased DATA RESCUE II, and that glorious piece of software recovered all of my files in one evening. If you're buying this just to recover data, you should opt for Data Rescue II.

Rating:

- Just saved our Powerbook G4 directories
Great product. Just used to save everything we thought we had lost, following a run of Tech Tool 4. Worked for days trying to save files with Tech Tool tecnical support. Disk Warrior worked in a matter of minutes. What a relief.

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