[Dell Switcher]

Need advice as a 6 mth switcher...bought iMac 17 in March 2003 and have been very pleased with Apple HW and SW. So far, minor disk problems have been resolved with iMac's Disk Utility.

But I do use iMac extensively (about 6-8 hrs daily) mostly for business applications, internet, iPhoto, and iTunes.

Would it be advisable to purchase Disk Warrior 3 due to extensive use of hard drive?

With my old PC (only use about once a month now!) I had Norton Utilities which was needed to fix hard drive problems such as defrag, fixing shortcuts, etc.

[TheIceMan]

One word: YES. In fact, I bought it and it's still in the box. But, you know what? It's going to be so helpful when you need it most. If you do a search you'll find testimonies of Mac users who have had DW save their behinds more times than they care to remember. I am one of those users.

[CharlesS]

DiskWarrior: YES.

However: do not get Norton Utilities for Mac. It has a very poor track record on OS X.

[chezpaul]

Here we go again.... Norton trashing for no reason.

I've been using Norton on so many macs now, I stopped counting and I've never had a problem. I do own Disk Warrior too but also in a closed box.

I've used Norton 6.03 but not 7 because yes, it was buggy. Now 8 is out and I use it everyday almost. I never install the software on my macs, I only reboot from the disc and run diskDoctor and Speed Disk and all is dandy. I run this once a month at least. I have my mother doing the same so it can't be that hard.

People who bash DiskWarrior in my experience are people who haven't used it in the right manner and that's all.

The are both good but at this stage, only Norton will defrag your disc.


Anyway... following.. more Nrton bashing I'm sure...

Oh and do a search also.. U'll find lots of yes and nos.... ;-)

[Adam Betts]

Originally posted by chezpaul:
Anyway... following.. more Nrton bashing I'm sure...

Sorry but Norton *does* blow big time.

[mrmister]

"Here we go again.... Norton trashing for no reason."

There is reason--I, for example, got my HD hosed by Norton. And I am hardly alone.

[maxintosh]

DiskWarrior is some of the best bucaroos you can ever spend.

I've had HDs fudged up by Norton before as well.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by chezpaul:
Here we go again.... Norton trashing for no reason.

I consider the fact that it hosed my hard drive twice - the first time requiring a reformat, the second time requiring a repair with DiskWarrior - to be a pretty good reason.

[zigzag]

You probably don't need to worry about defragging in OS X (from a former Norton engineer):

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07254

From the testimonials I've read, DiskWarrior could help you out of a real jam someday.

[maxintosh]

Norton was good back in the day of the IIci/IIse. Now it's horrible bloat-ware that makes problems worse instead of better.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by maxintosh:
Norton was good back in the day of the IIci/IIse. Now it's horrible bloat-ware that makes problems worse instead of better.

Or creates problems where none existed before, such as the time a few years ago with a hard drive I had that was working just fine and which every other disk utility (Disk First Aid, fsck, TechTool Pro, DiskWarrior) said was just fine. Because Norton sucks, it apparently thought something was wrong with every file on the disk and tried to "fix" it, causing the drive not to mount and requiring a repair with DiskWarrior.

Norton 3.5 was the last good version of Norton. Ever since HFS+, it's sucked badly.

[Eug]

I bought Disk Warrior 3 and I have never used it. That's fine by me. IF I ever have to use it, I'll know it's the best thing out there to do the job. (The previous version saved my drive after something in OS 9 fubar'd it.)

[suthercd]

I bought Disk Warrior, so I find it useful, but not necessary. There are aother way to get the same saftety net. A shareware application- Carbon Copy Cloner will make a bootable mirror of your drive on a firewire drive. It will also make that an image.

With a bootable firewire drive, you can reformat your original drive if things are really trashed and then restore from the mirror.

Disk Warrior is wonderful, great, excellent but not necessary.

Craig

[imago dei]

As you've already seen, DiskWarrior gets high marks from Mac users, myself included. See how it saved me quite recently in this thread.

I'd recommend picking up a copy now, because if your data is important to you, its worth at least the purchase of the program.

-imago dei

[Spheric Harlot]

I have had problems in the past.

However, the only problems serious enough not to be fixable with Apple's own tools were NOT reparable by Norton, either.

The one time my hard drive appeared *totally* hosed, it was after I'd started having problems that Disk Utility couldn't solve, so I ran Norton instead (whatever the current version was in December 2001). After that, my disk wouldn't even *show up* in any utility - EXCEPT Diskwarrior, which recovered it in three minutes after HOURS of blood, sweat, and tears, and phone calls to Apple's tech support (never needed in 12 prior years of Mac use), and local tech people.

I sing praises of Diskwarrior every time somebody asks since then.

I lost trust in Norton a while ago, and while their current offerings may be fine, I no longer care.

My two � cents.

-s*

[chezpaul]

Wow.. much more bashing than I'd imagine.. Usually there are some pro Norton's that hop in but I guess not this time.

I won't try to change anyone's mind but about the article sayin that defrag and optimize doesn't do @#$$#, I have to disagree. I work in a music environment and I have to defrag my drive once a week or my programs start running slower or even quit on me and this is a fact. (Pro Tools).

Everyone around me uses Norton so who knows.

Enough said.

The best way to fix something is to have a backup.. I use CCC... Very nifty...

[C.J. Moof]

DW has saved my butt more times than I can count. However, I was using it to try to pacify a grumpy OS X machine last week. It did it's thing, and came up with 3 pages of problems. It replaced the directory, and one of the errors remained- apps showed up as generic, or as folders.

It took an fsck -y to get the folders to show as proper icons. Moral of the story- you *need* DW in your toolbox, but don't forget the simple tools at your disposal too.

[TimmyDee51]

I've not had bad luck with Norton per se, but I find DiskWarrior to be supreme in pretty much all cases. It's fast, it catches more errors, etc.

I did run into a problem at work, today, with DW, though. We use ASR from the command line via FireWire disks to build machines as they come in. I ran DW on the FireWire drives (which have a bootable copy of 10.2.6) to see if there were any errors. They have been getting used heavily and there were errors (one critical) on one drive. I rebuilt the directories and it hosed the ASR functionality of the disk images. The images are still there, but they won't restore and they won't scan properly. It tries to copy from /var/tmp and the later I get an error when it tries to build the new filesystem on the target drive.

In any case, I sent in the issue to Alsoft support and hopefully they'll come up with something. I'll keep you posted if you're interested.

[Mooga2]

I can attest to Norton headaches when trying to resolve hard drive problems.

My two pennies: DiskWarrior is a godsend.

[Moonray]

Originally posted by suthercd:
I bought Disk Warrior, so I find it useful, but not necessary. There are aother way to get the same saftety net. A shareware application- Carbon Copy Cloner will make a bootable mirror of your drive on a firewire drive. It will also make that an image.

With a bootable firewire drive, you can reformat your original drive if things are really trashed and then restore from the mirror.

Disk Warrior is wonderful, great, excellent but not necessary.

Craig

Eeeermmmmmm.... you can do daily, weekly, and monthly backups of all your drives and then restore them if something goes wrong, but DiskWarrior would recover the lost files without that I had to spend time on such backups and would restore my files not to what they were last day or week but to what they were when they got lost.
Of course I do make backups of important data on CDs or whatever, and there are situations where DiskWarrior can't help, but it does save me time because I don't have to worry much about backups.

-

[Draco]

I've been trying to read up a lot about Disk Warrior, and I know everyone praises it, which is good, but it also concerns me. Do Apple systems really foul up that often to where ever Apple user should have a copy of Disk Warrior to feel comfortable using a OS X?

I'm new the Apple world, and I've been using Windows since before 95, and have upgraded through the years to the newest version, XP. I've never needed to use a "Disk repair too" such as a Disk Warrior. Of course I did have to reload windows on few occassions, but it wasn't usually due to hardware failure...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what Disk Warrior does. In any case I love my new Powerbook, I haven't really touched my PC the last few days, eek. So far OS X has been excellent.

[mrtew]

I doubt if Diskwarrior is really necessary.... OSX seems to take care of itself, but I do have a copy I use every now and then when I think I feel a slowdown and want to speed it up.

I have to add to the Norton 'bashing' though, which I refer to as Norton 'warning'. My friend had to get a new hard drive thru Applecare TWICE when Norton hosed her drive and she lost everything due to lack of backups. Both times I wrote it off as 'user error' as I defended Norton. Then it happened to me a few times and I learned my lesson. Don't use Norton. Well, at least don't use DiskDoctor. I think SpeedDisk is OK. If you ignore this warning and it ever does happen to you, the fix is to boot up with your OSX CD and remount and reformat your hard disc from there. No need to actually buy a new one.

[Timo]

Diskwarrior

[yukon]

i use diskwarrior as well. it's saved me data a couple of times....but that was in OS9. OS X seems to be more reliable, at least due to less hard rebooting. it does seem to offer a nice speed up, and fixes minor errors once in a while here...i had a little trouble with v.3 though, remember to keep the finder running while DW does it's thing.

yeah, norton is bad, i had it trash a number of files long ago (around Norton v3) and found v.7 to have problems, i only used the Unerase util after that. Now i use rm -P

just one quote is necessary, and it's from windows-
"Norton CrashGuard has crashed, repair with Norton CrashGuard?" (repeats as soon as any options selected, until system is unresponsive)

[Dale Sorel]

Originally posted by Timo:
Diskwarrior

Ditto

[lookmark]

Originally posted by Draco:
I've been trying to read up a lot about Disk Warrior, and I know everyone praises it, which is good, but it also concerns me. Do Apple systems really foul up that often to where ever Apple user should have a copy of Disk Warrior to feel comfortable using a OS X?

No. I've never once needed or used DW since using OS X.

But computers being computers, things do go haywire every so often -- and it's nice to know that if you're in a fix, there's a piece of software that's the best out there at fixing those kinds of problems. Think of it as insurance.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by lookmark:
No. I've never once needed or used DW since using OS X.

I needed it the time I made the mistake of running Norton on my drive...

[Sam Venning]

I think DiskWarriror 3.0 is great! It saved my bacon several times. In fact I used it today when Disk Utility couldn't repair a damaged directory on a PowerBook (I even tried booting from the Mac OS 10.2 install disc and launching Disk Utility to carry out the repair).

I will never touch Norton Utilities again (too many kernal panics).

It is worth forking out money to get DiskWarrior 3.0.

Sam

(the damaged directory I mention above was preventing removable media and network volumes appearing on the Mac OS 10 desktop).

[Sarc]

The only kernel panic I had in 10.1, was trying to unload the kext for Norton Utilities. The reason I was unloading it -and deleting it- was because NUM's uninstaller didn't do it.
Then again why did I want Norton out of my Mac ? because the damn suite was hogging my Mac.

From what I hear, DiskWarrior has saved many, many users.

Just my .02

[nobitacu]

Yes, it is very useful to have to keep your OS X in good health. This is one program you can't live without.

Ming

[Truepop]

I vote DiskWarrior as well but before 3 shipped, I used Drive10 and it worked, not as well, but it worked.

Plus one for DiskWarrior

[moki]

Originally posted by Dell Switcher:
Need advice as a 6 mth switcher...bought iMac 17 in March 2003 and have been very pleased with Apple HW and SW. So far, minor disk problems have been resolved with iMac's Disk Utility.

I wouldn't say that DiskWarrior is *necessary* but it can be very useful if you have catastrophic problems.

One thing that isn't necessary are virus checkers.

[fisherKing]

a vote for "necessary"; saved my life when my firewire drive wouldn't mount.

thought i might lose all my work, ran & got (the last copy instore!) at j&r (in ny), went home, ran it...back in business.


whew!

[mikemako]

Does anyone know if DW 3.0 is going to work with Panther? Also.. does Alsoft ever release minor updates for their products? It's strange that DW 3.0 came out quite a while ago and there's no 3.0.1 release.. or is that usual for disk utility apps?