The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood Kirk McElhearn is the author of many books, including This may be one of the few programs that every Mac user should own. Throughout many years, this program has showed its value as a data and bacon saver, and this new version continues to provide essential maintenance and repair features. Macworld’s buying adviceįew utilities are as important and as reliable as DiskWarrior 4. From the program’s File menu, the Rebuild Disk Image menu item prompts you to select a disk image, which DiskWarrior then mounts and repairs, if possible.

One new feature that DiskWarrior 4 offers is the ability to repair disk images that won’t mount in the Finder. While the program can’t fix all disk anomalies (such as corrupted partition maps, which are relatively rare), it will repair most disk problems that you’ll come across.Įven if your hard disk doesn’t mount, DiskWarrior can almost always repair it. We also ran DiskWarrior on hard disks where we manually corrupted directory information using a sector editor, and DiskWarrior repaired those problems too. We tested it on several Macs currently in regular use, and the program found and repaired instances on all of them. In our tests, DiskWarrior spotted many small and large problems on defective hard disks. status check, which indicates when certain anomalies are discovered that could lead to disk failure running this check automatically can alert you before bad things happen, so you have time to back up your data. Most recent IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) hard drives offer a S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) status of your hard disks, and lets you turn on automatic diagnostics. Finally, the Hardware tab tests the S.M.A.R.T.

In addition to rebuilding directories, the Files tab of the program lets you check files for corruption and rebuild permissions on startup volumes. Running DiskWarrior to optimize your directory can ward off nascent problems before they get serious, and it can also speed up your Mac’s startup time and access to files. While most people come to a program like DiskWarrior after they have experienced disk problems, the program is also designed for regular maintenance. Startup from the CD can take a few minutes, but once you start running the program, operations are much faster than in previous versions. Using it is simple the program’s interface is clear, and its options are well-explained in the documentation. DiskWarrior is designed to work from your computer, and you can repair more than one disk or volume, but you must use a special, bootable DiskWarrior CD if you want to repair or optimize your startup volume.

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