The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 10 out of 10]
- Developer: Alsoft / [Product Page]
- Price: $79.95
What finally drove me to select DiskWarrior this week was some odd activity on my G5 yesterday. I was working away when I noticed that my desktop picture changed from a selection of family images to the standard Aqua Blue JPEG. This happened without an error message or a crash of any sort. Finding it somewhat odd, to say the least, I opened the Desktop and Screensavers panel to reactivate my images ... only to find the iPhoto folder missing (I have my iPhoto library stored on a partition on the second SATA drive in my G5). A quick look in the Finder verified that my "videospace" partition had just vanished. Checking in the Terminal, there was definitely nothing mounted in /Volumes. I fired up Apple's Disk Utility, which could see the partition, and ran a Repair on it. After a very short amount of time, it claimed that it (a) had found nothing wrong and (b) had fixed whatever wasn't wrong with the drive. Needless to say, I still couldn't get it to mount.
So then I launched DiskWarrior, which also saw the partition without any troubles. I clicked DW's Rebuild button, and a few minutes later, I had a brand new disk directory to inspect. A quick look showed that everything appeared fine, so I had DW write the new directory back to the source disk. The videospace partition then mounted fine in the Finder, and all was back to normal (and yes, I had a quite recent backup; I might've lost about 8MB of sound files if I hadn't been able to recover the drive). DiskWarrior has also helped with the troublesome G5 / FireWire issues that some users, including myself, have had. I have a FW drive that I use to move large proejct files around, and it's probably died five or six times over the last year or so when moving it between the G5 and another Mac. In all cases, a new directory from DiskWarrior solved the problems and saved everything on the disk.
In its maintenance mode, DW can be set to watch the SMART status (a self-health feature found on most new hard drives) of your drives, and send you an email when it sees an anomoly. This feature lets you work in peace, knowing that if you're drive notices it's about to fail, you'll receive an email about the problem. For the record, though, the SMART status on the failed partition yesterday never even squawked.
DiskWarrior isn't cheap, and it doesn't do a ton of things ... but what it does, it does very well. If your data is important to you, $80 is a small price to pay -- even if you only need to use it once or twice!

