Hands-On Report--Drive 10 v1.1.3

by Dana Baggett

As we noted on December 23, the Drive 10 1.1.3 Updater was released by MicroMat. In the midst of a winter storm on the coast of Maine I decided to try it out.

First, I ran it from the boot volume on my Cube and tested the FireWire external hard drive that I have. All went well. No apparent differences between this version and v. 1.1.2. It performed a test of the volume structure, rebuilt the volume structure and optimized the volume.

Then, I rebooted using the FW drive on which I had installed Drive 10 v.1.1.3 and proceeded to run the same Drive 10 procedures on the 1 GHz upgraded G4 Cube's internal hard drive. All went well until I was in the midst of rebuilding the volume structures. A momentary blip in the power--there is a blizzard going on--caused a slight interruption in the procedure at precisely the wrong time. The power interruption occurred in spite of my APC Back-UPS kicking in at once. The result was that my hard drive directory was damaged. Oh boy, I could not see it on the Cube's desktop. What to do?

I ran Drive 10 again. It confirmed that there was damage to the Volume Structure. Did I want to use Disk Utility? Yes. Disk Utility claimed to have repaired the drive. But, I still couldn't see the drive's icon on Cube's desktop so I ran Drive 10 again. It continued to report hard drive damage. Did I want to repair it using Drive 10? Yes.

Repair of Volume kicked in. "Repairing volume structures will recover the directory and repair problems with the volume." It took a while but indeed, the hard drive is repaired. Whew. A scary way to review Drive 10.

My conclusion. Drive 10 works as advertised. But, don't rebuild volume structures in the midst of a snow storm.