5342 DiskWarrior, AlSoft Inc.’s flagship software product, is acclaimed by many (including yours truly) to be the hands-down best Mac OS disk maintenance utility. DiskWarrior has been fondly dubbed a one trick pony that does its trick extremely well. That’s not quite accurate anymore. It still does a superb job or rebuilding disk directories, but hte current DiskWarrior 4 also performs on number of other disk maintenance tasks that were not supported by Classic DiskWarrior. Howeverm the release of OS 10.5 Leopard has complicated the use of DiskWarrior somewhat, albeit temporarily.


AlSoft Support has announced that their DiskWarrior 4 disk maintenance, diagnostic, repair and optimization utility is now shipping on DiskWarrior CD revision 41, which is a universal startup CD that can start up both PowerPC and Intel Macs. All Mac models meeting the system requirements for DiskWarrior can be started from the revision 41 CD.

While AlSoft says DiskWarrior 4.0 will successfully rebuild a disk that has Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard installed or a disk that has been attached to a computer running Leopard, there is a caveat. Some operating system functionality has changed within Leopard itself, and consequently there are some compatibility issues when running an installed copy of DiskWarrior 4.0 while started up from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Alsoft currently recommends that you do not run DiskWarrior 4.0 while the computer is started from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Instead, to run DiskWarrior, you should start up the computer from either:

1) A DiskWarrior 4.0 CD.

2) Any disk that starts up in 10.4.x and then run DiskWarrior 4.0, for example you could boot from an external FireWire hard drive that has OS 10.4 installed, or, as in my own PowerBook, a Tiger install on a separate partition of your internal hard drive.

In practical terms, you have to be booted from another volume in order to repair a drive directory anyway. I have bootable installations of OS X on two of my PowerBook’s three hard drive partitions - one currently OS 10.5.1 Leopard and the other OS 10.4.11 Tiger, so I can run DiskWarrior from the Tiger partition with a minimum of inconvenience, I also keep a copy of DiskWarrior on my external FireWire hard drive, which has OS X 10.3.9 installed that will boot any of my four current Apple ‘Books. Another way to go is to connect two Macs with a FireWire cable and the machine to be checked by DiskWarrior booted in FireWire Disk Mode. However, if only the CD is available, it works perfectly well other than the slow boot process.

AlSoft promises that an updated version of DiskWarrior with complete Leopard compatibility will be released soon as a free download for existing owners of DiskWarrior 4.0.

In the meantime, what you can expect when running DiskWarrior 4.0 under Mac OS X 10.4.x and rebuilding a Leopard disk is as follows.

All features work as expected with two exceptions:

1) You should not use any utility to repair permissions of a Leopard start up disk while started from Mac OS X 10.4.x or earlier. Permissions will either not be be repaired or will be repaired improperly. This is true whether you repair permissions with Apple's Disk Utility, DiskWarrior, or any other third-party utility. Regardless of which utility you use, the same service within Mac OS X is used to perform the actual permissions repair so the behavior is always the same.

To repair permissions of a Leopard startup disk, be sure you've always started your Mac from Leopard. Alsoft also recommends using only the Disk Utility included with Leopard to repair permissions until an updated version of DiskWarrior is released.

If you have used any utility to repair permissions of a Leopard startup disk while started from Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier, Alsoft recommends that you perform an upgrade install of Leopard over your existing Leopard install. This will restore any changed permissions to their original values without altering your data.

2) FileVaults created while started from Leopard are not visible to DiskWarrior 4.0 and cannot be rebuilt (repaired).

What you can expect when running DiskWarrior 4.0 under Mac OS X 10.5 and rebuilding a Leopard disk.

While not recommended (and discouraged), if you do run DiskWarrior 4.0 while started from Mac OS X 10.5 you might encounter some problems such as:

1) You cannot rebuild FileVaults or disk images.

2) In step 9 (comparing directories) of a rebuild, the progress bar might get to 100% even though the comparison step is not finished and will continue to execute.

3) When performing Check All Files and Folders the progress bar might get to 100% even though the check is not finished and will continue to execute.

4) After rebuilding a disk, DiskWarrior may report that some files or folders have had their permissions changed. This is inaccurate and the permissions have not been changed.

For my full review of Disk Warrior (Version 3), click here.
http://www.applelinks.com/index.php/more/charles_moore_reviews_alsoft_diskwarrior_303/

Gary Coyne's Review of DiskWarrior 4 is here:
http://www.applelinks.com/index.php/more/review_diskwarrior_4/

For more information, visit:
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/support.html

DiskWarrior sells for $49.95 upgrade, $99.95 for the full version.

For more information, visit:
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/


Charles W. Moore

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