By Graham K. Rogers

Earlier this week the latest version of Disk Warrior arrived in my mailbox. Alsoft now provides Disk Warrior 5 on a USB flash drive as news Macs no longer come with the optical drive. I spent several hours looking at the ways in which this powerful utility could be installed on and run from various media, writing about this in a series of linked articles (see below).

As well as the essential repair and maintenance features for which Disk Warrior is well-known, there is a selection of other tools that can help users reinforce the protection they need. These were also available in the previous version.

Disk Warrior Panel

Attaching a disk changes these icons (along with the disk selector button): the Unmount and Eject icons become live. Pressing either reveals a small panel asking if the user is sure about the action request. Once the disk is elected, the icons return to their greyed-out state after a few seconds.

The Information icon (i) opens a panel that displays information about the disk shown in the disk selector button. If the disk chosen is the startup disk, the Unmount and Eject keys are immediately greyed out.

The three icons to the left of the panel are for the tasks that Disk Warrior can carry out on a disk. The first of these Directory will display information about the disk and its optimization status, but it is only possible to use the Rebuild button when the disk selected is one other than the startup disk.

Files

• Repair Permissions does not display the same information as when this is run using Disk Utility. For example one of the processes shown was 'Examining known files and folders." The process took 2 min 44 seconds and a report (like the Rebuild report) was shown on the Desktop. As this includes the Disk Warrior serial number, it is not shown here.

• Check all Files and Folders was shorter at 2 minutes exactly. Items checked were
  • Checking files and folders
  • Checking property list files
  • checking file and folder paths
  • Checking folder hierarchy depths
  • Checking file forks
  • Checking folder item counts

The number of files that had property list and resource data checked was shown, along with the maximum folder depth (24). Two property list files (both Apple and linked to the App Store) were found to be damaged and unrepairable. I deleted those two files then ran the check again. Although these files had been deleted, the utility found hidden versions and again reported them as corrupt. This will need some further investigation. I saved a copy of the report.

Hardware

• Manual Diagnostics displayed two buttons in the lower part of the panel: the hard disk selected and Test Device. An icon of the selected disk was shown and a brief text description was shown alongside. Below was a pane (initially blank) in which the report was displayed.

  When I pressed Test Device, the utility examined the S.M.A.R.T. status (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) of the disk and reported that all was well.

• Automatic Diagnostics allows the user to setup testing and monitoring schedules. When the box for the automatic checks is selected, there are options for Never, Hourly, Daily and Weekly (Hourly is the default).

  Several methods for notification are available with the default (controlled by a checkbox) being an on-screen warning. Also available are warnings via E-mail, AppleScript and Text Message:

• Selecting E-mail requires the recipients details to be entered in a configuration panel. The detailed information needed should be shown in Mail preferences. A button is available for sending a test mail.
• To run an AppleScript the user is prompted to select a suitable file from a Finder window.
• The Message option will send an SMS to a phone. The panel allows entering of a phone number and selection of the carrier. The menu only shows a selection of 19 carriers from north America and Europe, although a Customize button alongside is available so that other carrier details may be included. As part of this, a user needs to enter details of the relevant gateway (e.g. txt.att.net).




See Also:

• Disk Warrior Updated to Version 5 and Available on USB drive: (1) Opening the Box

• Disk Warrior Updated to Version 5 and Available on USB drive: (2) Installing on the Mac and External Media

• Disk Warrior Updated to Version 5 and Available on USB drive: (3) Making a Rescue Disk and Running the Repair

• Disk Warrior Updated to Version 5 and Available on USB drive: (4) Updating the DiskWarrior USB Drive




Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.