When OS X’s Disk Utility Doesn’t Work, DiskWarrior Does

If you have ever had to use OS X’s Disk Utility to fix a problem and found that it was useless, I have a solution for you: DiskWarrior from Alsoft, Inc. This will most likely get discussed in a future Gearhead but my problem, briefly, was this: I had a Kano SureVAULT RAID5 setup that suffered a physical assault (the Firewire 800 connectors got wrenched off the i/o board because the data cable was pushed against a wall). The worst part was that the violent removal of the connectors caused the disk volume to become unreadable! Very unfortunate and even more so because the drive array stored my photo collection which I had put there for safety while I tested some software on Mac that need more disk space than I had left. I reconnected the array using the remaining USB and then the Firewire 400 port and in both cases the volume wouldn’t mount under OS X. You might think that Apple’s Disk Utility would be of assistance but all it would do is produce this error message: Oct 13 20:18:48: Disk Utility started. Verifying volume “Kano SureVAULT 800” Invalid Volume Header Checking HFS Plus volume. Checking Extents Overflow file. Checking Catalog file. Invalid sibling link The volume Kano SureVAULT 800 needs to be repaired. Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit Pathetic! Thus it was that I came to try DiskWarrior. To use the software you simply boot from the DiskWarrior CD and tell it to fix the damaged volume. Less than five minutes later the volume on the drive array was back up and running! Outstanding! DiskWarrior also does a lot more than recover damaged volumes (although that would be more than enough!) — see the Web site for more information. If you are a Mac OS X user you absolutely MUST have DiskWarrior. At $79.95 it is a very low cost way to ensure that you avoid having a very, very bad day.