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ALSOFT DiskWarrior for OS X (Macintosh)

ALSOFT DiskWarrior for OS X (Macintosh)

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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: About the 10.3 update.
Review: In a previous review the writer paid $20 for an update to osx10.3?

Just went to the Alsoft site and this is what it said:

"Customers who already own DiskWarrior 3.0 may download the DiskWarrior 3.0.1 CD Update free of charge from the Alsoft web site."

and

"Customers who own DiskWarrior 1.x or 2.x can can purchase the DiskWarrior 3.01 upgrade for $39.95 plus shipping and handling directly from Alsoft."

(...)

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Worthless software
Review: My experience shows this to be absolutely worthless software. I do not understand how anyone could give it a good review. I wasted money on it based on the reviews that I've read. It scanned my drive, pointed out three problems, and told me the drive was unfixable. I installed Tech Tools Pro 4 and it scanned the same drive, reported the errors and fixed them. Twice Disk Warrior has proven to be totally impotent. Walk on by this product and invest in Tech Tools Pro 4. Would that I could get my money back.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Lifesaver
Review: My G4 has been beautifully stable but software conflicts brought it to its knees. It is terrifying when your hard drive disappears and the disk utility repair functions are useless. If you see the warning, "overlapping extent allocation", breathe easier...DiskWarrior handles it. Before you call an expert (who over the phone suggested my drive had died) try DiskWarrior. Within 30 minutes, I had my computer back.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: life saver
Review: Saved a disk that was damaged with Norton Utilites 2.0 in half an hour. Highly recommended for Mac OS X users.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Miracle!
Review: The Most Amazing Piece Of Software Ever. If you catalog file is damaged, the only way to fix it is Disk Warrior. I F**ked up my mac and this prgram cleaned up the mess right away. A somewhat slow process but it never crashes and always work. I would never return it. Thank You Alsoft!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fricken Awesome
Review: 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: 4 stars
Summary: DiskWarrior 3.0
Review: 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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