I was working away when I noticed that my desktop picture changed from a selection of family images to the standard Aqua Blue JPEG. What finally drove me to select DiskWarrior this week was some odd activity on my G5 yesterday. If all goes well, you wind up with your disk functional again, and all of your data intact.
DiskWarrior uses a special method to examine a 'crashed' drive, create a new master directory of the disk's contents, and then lets you examine the new directory before writing it to the drive. You only need it when you have a disk in trouble, but at those times, it can be a lifesaver.
DiskWarrior is a drive recovery and (to some extent) preventative maintenance tool. It's one of those programs that I consider essential, yet it's (hopefully!) seldom used.
Price: $79.95This Pick is long overdue I've owned and used various versions of DiskWarrior for a number of years.Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!īe sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.
#BEST HARD DRIVE DIAGNOSTIC AND REPAIR TOOL FOR MAC OS X INSTALL#
If you manage to clear the SMART error then you might be able to get the OS X installer to recognize the drive as a valid installation destination and continue the install however, do keep in mind that the error may still persist and only be temporarily averted, so even after testing the drive you might still consider replacing it with a new one and only using it as a spare storage space or as a diagnostics drive. You can also try basic drive-conditioning routines like repartitioning and formatting (writing to zeros to force the drive to substitute bad blocks) to see if this clears the SMART warning.īy using a good drive diagnostics and repair tool such as Drive Genius or Tech Tool Pro, then another approach is to run benchmarks and integrity tests on the drive to ensure it works properly and is performing optimally before putting it to use (the more extensive of a test you can run, the better). To do this, first be sure to play it safe and back up the contents of the drive, and then get a robust and dedicated SMART tool such as SMARTReporter or SMART Utility that will tell you the exact error the drive is reporting and whether it is a critical error or one that is less important. If you plan on relying on the drive as a main boot device or for one that will store important information, then you might wish to play it safe and replace the drive, but if not then you can investigate the SMART status a bit more to see if you can discern the exact problem. However, despite these possibilities, you do have to weight them against how the drive is going to be used. Sometimes in these cases, the error can be addressed by simply formatting the drive, changing the location of the system to increase air flow, or simply by ignoring it. In personal experiences, I have had some drives issue SMART warnings and then continue to work for years after. In addition to potentially insignificant error reporting, SMART technology may throw a false alarm or just be a temporary situation that will clear by itself. For instance, a collection of bad blocks can be enough to cause a SMART error, or if the drive's temperature gets too high because of poor ventilation or other environmental conditions, then SMART may issue an error. In some cases, as with the OS X installer, the specifics of the SMART error do not matter and the program will just detect the error and give you a warning, even if the error is relatively benign. While hardware errors such as those measured by SMART are generally a cause for alarm and the general recommendation is to replace the drive, it is not always necessary to do so. When the drive is operational it monitors how often these metrics hit a warning threshold, and if they do so repeatedly or for prolonged periods of time then the drive will issue a warning to the system that the SMART is detecting a potential error. The SMART attributes are a standard that monitors a variety of metrics such as disk surface error rates, spin up times, data throughput, write head stability, and rpm variation, among many other options. Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (aka, SMART) is a feature built into hard disks to monitor the heath status of the drives and provide the system with a method to detect an impending failure or other problem with the drive that might need to be addressed.
When this happens, the system will claim the drive cannot be repaired and recommend you back it up as soon as possible and replace the disk. One error you might run into when attempting to install OS X on your computer is a claim by the installer that the hard drive has SMART errors and will not allow you to install to the selected drive.
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