Hands-On Report--DiskWarrior 4.0 (Universal)
For those who aren't familiar with it--and Intel Mac owners have not had a DW version that would run on their Macs until v.4.0 was issued as a Universal application late last week--DW is essentially a one trick pony. It repairs and optimizes hard drive disk directories by building a new one and then, once you have had an opportunity to compare the before and after directories, you can replace the old with the new. Past versions of DW have repaired our PPC hard drives when other utilities could not, a for-real life-saver.
We popped the DW CD in our Early 2006 20 inch iMac Intel Core Duo disk drive. Besides the application, the CD contains a Read Me file, a Quick Start guide, and a 52 page detailed DiskWarrior Manual in PDF format. There's also an Installation Instructions file which notes among other things that "You must be running Max OS X version 10.3.9 or later to install DiskWarrior 4.0." We read all the documents except for the 52 pager. We urge that others do, too.
To install the application on your hard drive, you drag and drop it. Alsoft recommends that DiskWarrior reside in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder. However, DW cannot repair or replace a directory on the same hard drive on which it resides. Installing the app on an internal hard drive does permit one to optimize a external hard drive, like the FW drive one we regularly use to backup our internal hard drive. (We hope you do, too.) It also permits repair of disk permissions and a scan of all files and folders on the resident hard drive for damage and potential compatibility problems.
But, to create a new, optimized hard drive directory you must boot from another drive. Hence, the CD has a limited version of Mac OS 10.4.8 on it. So, we booted from the CD. About seven minutes later--after lots and lots of clunking and whirring--the app splash screen finally appeared! Fortunately, the Mac OS on the CD does support our Apple Bluetooth wireless mouse.
While we did not have a damaged disk directory, we went ahead to rebuild it. But first, we clicked on the button to have DW graph the present state of our directory. It reported that about 10,000 of 900,000 items on our hard drive were out of order, or 1%. But, just to keep us humble, it also noted that "Optimized directories have 0% items out of order." Right. DW then analyzed our hard drive and reported several problems in disconcerting red type. And we thought our hard drive was in very good condition. More humble pie. We proceeded to have DW produce a new, optimized directory. We opted for a side by side comparison new vs. old. Then we opted to replace the old one with the new. Done. We rebooted into the hard drive and all is well.
To test the use of DW running on a hard drive rather than from the CD, we switched on our Minimate external 80 gig FireWire hard drive. Using the DW application we installed on our internal iMac hard drive, we proceeded to create a new, optimized directory on our external FW drive. No clunky boot up process this time. The app appeared immediately on the desktop and after entering our administrator password, we proceeded to optimize the FW hard drive. 30,000 items out of order out of about 900,000 total. (Since it is a clone of our internal hard drive, the overall size is identical.) And, of course the ever present reminder that the goal is 0% out of order. An analysis of the external FW drive produced more red advisory comments. Optimizing the directory made them go away. Finally. we installed DW on the external drive. That way, we can run DW in the future to optimize our iMac hard drive without the slow, kludgey bootup from the CD.
DW works as well as it ever has and now it is a Universal app ready to respond when an emergency arises on our Intel iMac. We'll sleep better tonight. [Dana Baggett]
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