The IT Nerd

One thing that a lot of people never think about is what tools you need to have if disaster strikes. As a computer consultant, I have to think about that because my clients pay me to. In the Mac universe, that means that I need to have Diskwarrior in my toolkit to save my Mac customers from disaster. What is Diskwarrior you ask? It’s an app made by a company called Alsoft that comes in the form of a bootable DVD which will prevent and repair common directory issues on a Mac hard disk. Not only that, if your disk is non-bootable, Diskwarrior can often recover your data to the point that the disk becomes bootable again.

Diskwarrior is simple to use. Simply insert the DVD into your Mac and restart it while holding the “C” key (you can let go when you see the Apple logo and hear the DVD drive reading the disk). It will take quite a while to boot (like up to 10 minutes), but once it’s up you simply have to click on the rebuild button. The program will then scan your hard drive and work its magic to repair issues on the hard drive of your Mac. Not only that, but it will construct an optimized directory and allow you to replace your current directory with it. This is also the same methodology that it uses to recover data from a non-bootable hard disk. The big plus is that anybody can use Diskwarrior. Seriously. When I say anybody, I do mean anybody. Another thing that I should note, I have used Diskwarrior since 2002 and I have yet to find a Mac hard disk that it won’t fix… Unless it’s physically damaged of course. At that point you better have a recent backup handy. The fact that I can say that about any disk utility shows you how good Diskwarrior is.

A couple of things to note. Diskwarrior works with every version of OS X all the way up to Mountain Lion. However, the current version of the DVD won’t boot the latest MacBook Pro models that were introduced in June. But Alsoft is really good about getting Diskwarrior updated. Thus I don’t think that it won’t be too long before updated DVDs as well as downloadable disk updaters for existing users are available.

Diskwarrior is $99.95 USD direct from Alsoft. But you might be able to find it at your local computer store as well. If you want my advice, run it once a month to keep the data on Mac safe.

If you want something in your toolbox to protect the data on your Mac, you should get a copy of Diskwarrior before you actually need it.

This entry was posted on August 22, 2012 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Products with tags Diskwarrior, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.