When Should I Use DiskWarrior?
The best use of DiskWarrior is for preventative maintenance of your disks. Many forms of directory damage do not manifest themselves until long after the damage has actually occurred.
You can prevent this damage from escalating by running DiskWarrior on your disks regularly - we suggest at least once each month. DiskWarrior will rebuild your disk directory, eliminating all existing directory damage. The directory DiskWarrior creates is also optimized for maximum directory performance, and this will speed up the performance of your disk.
Obviously, you should run DiskWarrior when you suspect that there is directory damage on one of your disks. Directory damage can result in a disk not mounting (not appearing on the desktop when the computer is started), missing files or folders, an inability to move or copy files, or crashes when files are used.
Finally, you should run DiskWarrior if your Mac explicitly warns you of a problem with your disk in the form of an error message. Most of these errors are reported by the built-in Disk Utility whether your Mac OS X version is 10.3 Panther, 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, or 10.6 Snow Leopard. Here are some of the most common messages:
- Disk Repair: The disk was not repairable by this computer. It is being made available to you with limited functionality. You must back up your data and reformat the disk as soon as possible.
- The underlying task reported failure on exit.
- Invalid node structure.
- Keys out of order.
- Invalid key length.
- Invalid directory item count.
- Invalid extent entry.
- Invalid record count.
- Invalid index key.
- Invalid sibling link.
- Missing thread record.
- Invalid B-tree node size.
- Invalid leaf record count.
- Invalid volume file count.
- Invalid volume directory count.
- Invalid volume free block count.
- Invalid volume header.
- Volume header needs minor repair.
- Volume bitmap needs minor repair.
- Incorrect number of thread records.
- Incorrect number of extended attributes.
- Incorrect number of Access Control Lists.
- Unused node is not erased.
These messages are less common:
- Invalid node height.
- Incorrect block count for file.
- Overlapped extent allocation.
- Invalid number of allocation blocks.
- Invalid BTH length.
- Overlapped node allocation.
- Invalid catalog record type.
- Invalid catalog PEOF.
- Invalid extent file PEOF.
- Invalid B-tree header.
- Catalog file entry not found for extent.
- Missing directory record.
- Invalid key for thread record.
- Invalid parent CName in thread record.
- Invalid BSD file type.
- Incorrect number of directory hard links.
- Incorrect number of file hard links.
- Invalid finder info for file hard link.
- Incorrect flags for file hard link.
- Orphaned file inode.
These messages occur with the least frequency:
- Missing file record for file thread.
- Invalid root node number.
- Invalid map node.
- Invalid header node.
- Invalid directory record length.
- Invalid catalog record length.
- Invalid file or directory ID found.
- Indirect node needs link count adjustment.
- Incorrect folder count in a directory.
- HasFolderCount flag needs to be set.
- Invalid parent for directory inode.
- Incorrect owner flags for directory hard link.
- Previous ID in a hard link chain is incorrect.
- Next ID in a hard link chain is incorrect.
- Incorrect flags for file inode.
- Invalid first link in hard link chain.
- Orphaned file hard link.
- Incorrect size for file.
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10.6 Snow Leopard Support (New!)
Winner Macworld 23rd Annual Editors' Choice Award
In the past decade, no other utility has come close to challenging its prowess at repairing disk-directory problems.
Macworld Magazine
Throughout many years, this program has showed its value as a data and bacon saver. This may be one of the few programs that every Mac user should own.
John Gruber, Daring Fireball
Thanks to DiskWarrior, I lost nothing. If you don’t own DiskWarrior, buy it immediately.
IT-Enquirer Editor's Choice
I’ve had at least 2 disks over the years that I managed to bring back to life using DiskWarrior, where other tools failed.
Bob "Dr. Mac" Levitus (Houston Chronicle)
Alsoft’s DiskWarrior 4 just saved my bacon again. When I restarted, my Mac was back to normal.
