Is DiskWarrior worth it??

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NathanHamler
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p.1 #1 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

i have a Glyph FW800 drive, that wasn't able to be formatted AT ALL with disk utility, so i figured it was dead.....so i sent it back to glyph and they fixed it, sent it back, and then it just happened again like a couple months later......so i called glyph, they said "the first time we repaired it, the mechanism itself was fine, it was just corrupted and they repaired it with diskwarrior......"

This time, disk utility was able to START the format, but didn't error out until the end, at which point it came back with the error :

Disk erase failed with the error: Unable to write to the last block of the device. Then it popped up and said "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer"

SO, my question is, i've never used diskwarrior, but i'm wondering if it will be able to help me with this PARTICULAR issue. I've heard that it doesn't fix EVERY problem, but the ones it does fix, it's about the only thing that will fix them. I have a really good backup regimen, and the physical longevity of my drives haven't been a problem, it's just that i use FW800 drives to edit photos off of, using Aperture, and i guess sometimes a small corruption in the Aperture database, will cause a corruption that downs the whole drive.....i'm wondering if diskwarrior will help, before i shell out the money, or before i send it back to Glyph for no reason, when i can just buy DiskWarrior and have it for next time this happens........let me know if anyone has advice...Thanks!

Feb 12, 2013 at 05:12 AM

Peter Figen
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p.1 #2 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

I consider DW to be one of those mandatory tools that you need to have around. When you need it, nothing else will do and it can get you out of so many jams. I try to run DW about once a month as part of regular drive maintenance.

Feb 12, 2013 at 05:34 AM

Rogue416
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p.1 #3 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

I can not comment on DiskWarrior, (I'm a PC guy) but there is another product worth considering, SpinRite. While it does not run on a Mac, this article has some information you might find useful:

http://davidseah.com/infotech/2011/10/16/recovering-a-bad-macintosh-external-drive/

Good luck.

Trent

Feb 12, 2013 at 05:50 AM

Keith B.
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p.1 #4 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Disc Warrior has been one of the long term reliable utilities for mac.
I had two matching Glyph drives. Always had odd mounting problems, Glyph service were surly at best, morons at worst, ended up tossing the Glyph housings and saving the low-end Seagate drives Glyph had equipped them with.
If my experience is typical, the world would be better off with Glyph going off a cliff.

Feb 12, 2013 at 06:43 AM

Peter Figen
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p.1 #5 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

If you happen to own a Drobo or something like an OWC Raid box, both companies actively encourage you to run DW on a regular basis. Much better to nip small problems in the bud before they become date threatening tragedies.

Feb 12, 2013 at 08:36 AM

morganb4
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p.1 #6 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Yes

Feb 12, 2013 at 08:51 AM

Bifurcator
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p.1 #7 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

This: http://www.alsoft.com ?

I have the newest version and have had the program on my drive for ages. It's lame! It's worth about $15 at most. It doesn't do anything you can't do from the shell yourself.

The manual is probably why this applet is popular at all. It's a wordy pile of hype and techno-jargon that really makes this seem awesome. Too bad they didn't spend the time to make better and more features tho. Of all the drive repair and recovery tools this is the red-headed step-child with empty pockets and holes in his knees.

Drobo or some company might mention this tool as good because it has the smallest footprint (less features = smaller app) and has a GUI for the three most common things (which are the ONLY things DW does BTW) one does for common drive maintenance: structure repair, file scanning, and scheduled S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. Oh you can do Repair Permissions with it too. :P It's not faster or better than diskutil or fsck/fsck_hfs and a free SMART monitor like smartctrl - and in fact is slower at a few things.

To me it might be worth $10 or $15 to put those things in one convenient little GUI (if I didn't already know how to do that myself). If you want a suite of tools that actually does something beyond which comes free with OS X already then maybe:

Smart Utility: http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php
TechTool Pro: http://www.micromat.com/techtoolpro
Speed Tools Pro: http://www.speedtools.com
Drive Genius: http://www.prosofteng.com/products/drive_genius.php

SO, my question is, i've never used diskwarrior, but i'm wondering if it will be able to help me with this PARTICULAR issue?

No, absolutely not. If the drive isn't already formatted DW can't do anything at all.

Edited on Feb 13, 2013 at 10:44 AM · View previous versions

Feb 12, 2013 at 12:39 PM

Ho1972
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p.1 #8 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Rogue416 wrote:
I can not comment on DiskWarrior, (I'm a PC guy) but there is another product worth considering, SpinRite. While it does not run on a Mac, this article has some information you might find useful:

http://davidseah.com/infotech/2011/10/16/recovering-a-bad-macintosh-external-drive/

Good luck.

Trent

Have you seen Spinrite do anything useful on a modern hard drive? Back in the day, Spinrite might have served a purpose. Now all it does is thrash drives to death. I'd avoid it.

Feb 12, 2013 at 06:42 PM

NathanHamler
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p.1 #9 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Bifurcator wrote:

No, absolutely not. If the drive isn't already formatted DW can't do nothing at all.

So if the drive currently isnt (fully) formatted, and it wont mount, what the heck am i supposed to do??

Feb 12, 2013 at 07:27 PM

WAYCOOL
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p.1 #10 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Had a drive that wouldn't boot because of a bad cluster in the windows boot files, fixed it right up. Had a friend with a drive that was slow and making repeated attempts at reading (clicking noises) ran Spinrite never had a problem sense. Works just fine for the intended purpose. If you have bad clusters then its the tool to use, if your problem is not related to ban or hard to read clusters then it won't do squat.

Feb 12, 2013 at 07:50 PM

Bifurcator
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p.1 #11 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Yeah, Spinrite would probably work. That's a Windows (err. FreeDOS) based low-level surface scanner and sector integrity tester. Our drives have two tables or "maps" which tell the controller where bad sectors (AKA: blocks) are so as to avoid them. One is written to the drives on-board ROM and is constructed during the factory test. The other is written onto a private area of the platter itself and can be modified by the drive automatically as it encounters sector errors or by applications like I listed (and/or Spinrite). Not DW tho... it doesn't have a surface scanner. It only repairs logical file system structure errors like file&folder vectors and allocations, scans for corrupt or illformed files - but only the ones in the current allocation table (directory structure), and does a lightweight defrag (which HFS formatted drives do NOT need BTW).

Bifurcator wrote:
...
No, absolutely not. If the drive isn't already formatted DW can't do anything at all.

NathanHamler wrote:
So if the drive currently isnt (fully) formatted, and it wont mount, what the heck am i supposed to do??

Does it appear in the device list and just won't mount? If so then there are a few things you can try. I'd return it myself - demanding that they replace everything - but if that option is exhausted then I would do a surface scan on the platter and map out the bad sectors. If the sectors are toward one end of the platter I would set the partitions before formatting, pulled back away from the troubled area by a few gigs. If the errors are in the middle I'd do the same thing with two partitions split around the troubles area. Then I would do a deep format to make sure none of the allocated sectors/blocks were encroaching on the thin spots - Spinrite or one of the integrity testers in the tools I listed can also work here. They do a repeated Write/Read/Compare across the entire surface of either the physical drive or the logical volume (whole disk or just the partitioned areas).

Most of these operations are time consuming and can take hours (each). So I would pick a lazy day when this can be a nice BG project and not cause frustration and angst.

Another thing that crossed my mind here is the various cables & connectors, interfaces, and power supplies - any or all of which can cause intermittent problems which easily appear to be platter errors. So if you have a completely different environment for the HDD unit I would definitely try that first! Moving the drive to another case or computer takes only 15min and may save you hours!

One common symptom of faulty cables, dirty connectors, or near-dead power supplies is data corruption after-all and isn't that what you said the first round of troubles was identified as being? If you do try that and the drive suddenly works fine then obviously you need to replace the cables and the case (if this is an external drive) and probably clean and recondition any of the ports they were connected to.

Feb 13, 2013 at 02:08 AM

Rogue416
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p.1 #12 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Ho1972 wrote:
Rogue416 wrote:
I can not comment on DiskWarrior, (I'm a PC guy) but there is another product worth considering, SpinRite. While it does not run on a Mac, this article has some information you might find useful:

http://davidseah.com/infotech/2011/10/16/recovering-a-bad-macintosh-external-drive/

Good luck.

Trent

Have you seen Spinrite do anything useful on a modern hard drive? Back in the day, Spinrite might have served a purpose. Now all it does is thrash drives to death. I'd avoid it.

A friend was having a problem with his brand new WD 2TB drive, bad sectors all over the place. He purchased the drive in November of last year. He asked my opinion and I talked him into giving me the drive for a few days while I ran SpinRite on it. Took care of the majority of bad sectors. Drive was usable with plenty of space and he has not had any more serious problems with it.

Trent

Feb 16, 2013 at 06:36 AM

Bifurcator
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p.1 #13 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Yeah, I'll contribute a vouch!

SpinRite is thee defacto awesome tool. Works on all logical formats and if the drive is salvageable SpinRite will salvage it! It won't do any of the kinds of things that DW does tho. It's only for mapping out bad or weak areas on the physical platter and moving the data that was written there to safer places - either on the same HDD or to another unit. It doesn't try to understand anything about the actual data tho - except for very basic low level structures. I think it would be a good general practice to run it on all your HDDs about once or twice a year - for those hyper-concerned with integrity issues. It's very well written too! Its execution recovery is elegant - so for example if you wanted to do only 5% of your drive per day, that wouldn't be a problem. And so on...

In the same breath however, if the drive is not going to be salvageable DO NOT use SpinRite on it! So clone the data off first before trying to save the HDD if that's what you're looking at.

Feb 16, 2013 at 07:42 AM

Alan321
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p.1 #14 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Nathan, do you have a different FW 800 cable that you can try ?

I don't see why DiskUtil could not format any partition of any single drive unless the drive is faulty.

Does the drive have a usb interface ? Perhaps you could take to someone with a windows system and get them to format it and test it. Or before doing that you could try DiskUtil again with the usb interface.

- Alan

Feb 17, 2013 at 05:35 AM

pjny
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p.1 #15 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Diskwarrior was a waste of money for me. Data Rescue 3 is worth every penny

Here's my experience wasting $108. BTW, Alsoft customer service/tech support people are even worse than their product. Cocky tech guys with macho qwerty fingers who don't take kindly to any criticism for their overpriced/underperforming software.

Here's what happened and the solution:

I have a Newertech Guardian Maxiumus with 2x2TB drives in a RAID 1 on Macbook Pro 2011 13" running 10.8.4. I turned on the drive tonight and got the dreaded "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." I saw the "rebuild" light blink but the drive indicators did not go red to indicate which drive was dead.

I tried Disk Utility but couldn't see the drives.

I removed the drives and put them in a Black X USB docking station but the same error showed up.

I purchased Disk Warrior but DW doesn't even see the drive.

I finally ran Data Rescue from Prosoft and it has sees the drive in quickscan mode and allowing me to copy files file by file/folder by tolder to a secondary 2 TB drive.

DR recovered every last file.

Don't waste your money on a product that won't perform.

Apr 04, 2013 at 07:18 AM

pjny
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p.1 #16 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Can you please elaborate on how diskwarrior is supposed to "nip small problems in the bud before they become date threatening tragedies."? I keep hearing all these claims about what diskwarrior does and I fell for them. Unfortunately I wasted my money when it could not perform.

Peter Figen wrote:
If you happen to own a Drobo or something like an OWC Raid box, both companies actively encourage you to run DW on a regular basis. Much better to nip small problems in the bud before they become date threatening tragedies.

Apr 04, 2013 at 07:30 AM

Shutterbug2006
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p.1 #17 · Is DiskWarrior worth it??

Rogue416 wrote:
Ho1972 wrote:
Rogue416 wrote:
I can not comment on DiskWarrior, (I'm a PC guy) but there is another product worth considering, SpinRite. While it does not run on a Mac, this article has some information you might find useful:

http://davidseah.com/infotech/2011/10/16/recovering-a-bad-macintosh-external-drive/

Good luck.

Trent

Have you seen Spinrite do anything useful on a modern hard drive? Back in the day, Spinrite might have served a purpose. Now all it does is thrash drives to death. I'd avoid it.

A friend was having a problem with his brand new WD 2TB drive, bad sectors all over the place. He purchased the drive in November of last year. He asked my opinion and I talked him into giving me the drive for a few days while I ran SpinRite on it. Took care of the majority of bad sectors. Drive was usable with plenty of space and he has not had any more serious problems with it.

Trent

If the drive was brand new, he should be having it replaced under warranty. It is not acceptable for a new drive to have a bunch of 'bad sectors'.

Spinrite is definitely still a very useful and capable hard disk maintenance product and it will remain in my toolbox I suspect, for many more years.

Apr 10, 2013 at 01:45 AM

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