diskwarrior
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Ask TUAW Video Edition: Maintenance on your Mac
This week, Julie writes in about being a new Mac user (having come from the Windows world). She wants to know what kind of maintenance she needs to run to keep her Mac working. I give a few suggestions, but there are A LOT more we could give her. Applications mentioned in this video: DiskWarrior: US$99 for a great utility Onyx: a powerful system utility -- use with CAUTION! Remember, you can leave us questions in the comments! The video is on the next page.
Has DiskWarrior's Eddy award been statue-napped?
Earlier tonight during Shawn King's Your Mac Life show, a chat room participant delivered a chilling warning to Alsoft, publishers of the venerable and vital DiskWarrior utility: a cherished possession, the 2007 Eddy award for DiskWarrior, was being held hostage in an undisclosed location. Indeed, the kidnappededdy.com site does clearly show a rather unhappy-looking award with a succession of rambling, barely-comprehensible ransom demands... cigars, bacon, tofu, birdseed -- either these people have a serious dietary problem or someone copied Wile E. Coyote's shopping list by mistake.Our crack investigative team has run around looking very busy for the past few minutes, and our sources have all been dragged inside from their eclipse-watching parties to answer our urgent calls for information. We have reason to believe that the reprobates and ne'er-do-wells at Ambrosia Software are involved in some way with this award situation, and we can only hope that the wayward statue is quickly and safely returned to its owners -- unscathed and unscratched.Thanks to Mat, Shawn King, and "Mr. X."
DiskWarrior 4.1 update adds Leopard compatibility
DiskWarrior, my personal favorite disk repair utility (especially if the problem drive is the startup disk) has just been updated to Version 4.1. The new version is now fully compatible with Leopard (there were some issues with repairing disk permissions on a Leopard startup volume), so if you rely on DiskWarrior as an essential part of your Mac Toolkit arsenal (as I do), you can rest easy.Alsoft has also introduced some additional Leopard specific repair features in DiskWarrior 4.1. What has me the most excited is the ability to repair directory hard links. Hard-linking is a key part of how Time Machine creates back-ups. How the process works is complicated (although this article does a very good job of trying to explain the whole process), but it is a vital part of Apple's back-up system. The ability to repair directory hard links means that DiskWarrior 4.1 should be able to at least attempt to repair a Time Machine volume. That has actually been my only concern about Time Machine -- what happens if that volume become corrupted or wonky? I hope I don't find out first-hand, but I'm glad some options exist.Current users will soon be able to download an update CD directly from Alsoft's website that will create a new DiskWarrior startup disc (in the event that the drive needing repair is the startup volume and you don't have access to another Mac). However, please note that the update will only startup the same set of Macs as your current CD. So if your current CD will only boot up to June 2007 MacBook Pros, the update CD will not allow that disc to be used with a November 2007 MacBook.One other caveat, if you want to run DiskWarrior 4.1 from a version of OS X other than Leopard (say, Tiger), two features will not work. You will not be able to repair permissions of a OS X 10.5 startup disk and you will not be able to rebuild a FileVault created under OS X 10.5. So if you need to repair a Leopard volume, it is best to either run the startup CD or access the drive from a computer that is also running Leopard.[via MacTech]
Diskwarrior 4.0 is finally here!
Diskwarrior is The Essential Mac Disk Utility. Alsoft says so. I say so. Most Mac admins worth their salt say so. So there you have it.For too long we've been waiting on Alsoft to show us a little more love, though. Intel Macs are standard across the board, yet Diskwarrior still lingered in PPC-only purgatory. That made us sad. We muddled through, making do with other utilities from other companies, but none of them really filled the void left by Alsoft.Today Diskwarrior loyalists have been rewarded for their patience, and Diskwarrior 4 is available for download or on CD. You'll need Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later to install it, but you can still use it to repair older systems, of course. Diskwarrior 4 is Universal Binary and boasts serious speed improvements and a host of major feature additions and enhancements. Complete details available on the product page, which I encourage you to read, with a concise summary of new features on the upgrade page (Thanks, Trevor!).The price has gone up a bit (didn't it used to be $79?), but that's fine by me since there are a bunch of new features. $99.95 gets you the instant gratification download that you'll need to install on a bootable volume other than the one you need to repair, like another Mac or a Firewire drive with an OS already on it (10.3.9 or later). Alsoft will mail you an official bootable CD as well, covering all the bases. $49.95 gets you the CD-only upgrade. That's right - no download for upgraders, which kinda sucks, since you'll have to wait three to four weeks for delivery of your CD, but I know a number of people who will gladly pay the extra 50 bucks to download the full priced version, rather than wait another 3-4 weeks. Yes, I am those people are crazy.
