DiskWarrior Rules!

DiskWarrior is one of those gems of a program that I discovered in a time of dire need. I had to repair an HD that fsck wouldn't fix, and I was skeptical of Norton's capability. I needed something immediately, and Alsoft offered a download of DiskWarrior that I could use to build a boot disk. It's been my favorite ever since.

The thing I like most about it is that it doesn't attempt to repair the existing HD, at least not right away. It creates a virtual disk of sorts, performs repairs on the preview, and rebuilds the disk's directory based on real data that it finds on the real disk. At least this is my assessment of how it works; my experiences bear this out. Their approach seems to me to be more reliable than Norton's fix-it-on-the-fly approach, since you don't touch the original data until you're sure you've got a valid directory. I've used it to repair disks that I would not have thought Norton stood a chance against.

On this particular occasion the HD in question wasn't being recognized by Disk Utility or Disk First Aid (OS 9.2.1). I pulled it and put it into a Firewire external case and plugged it in to my laptop. Disk Utility saw it, but couldn't repair it. TIme to pull out DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior gave me a preview rebuild of the directory, and put the "Preview" of the hard drive on my desktop. While DiskWarrior stated that it could not repair the volume because it was too damaged, the preview gave me an error-free way to back up the volume. Once backed up, I erased the drive and restored all the data.