Well I for one was very excited about Alsoft Diskwarrior 5, and it’s new USB Stick to run off and repair Macs, but unfortunately it has not worked out so well for me.
Now admittedly I am likely a strange case on this one. I have been trying to use it on 2 slightly out of the norm cases, and haven’t been able to to boot to the USB stick in either case. And though I have gotten it to run, it was via other means, and was not too impressed by the new 64 Bit Speeds.
The first case is my own computer, which is a MacPro 4,1, but the exception here is that I run a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4 GB of RAM, so I am unable to hold down option and select a startup disc on boot, nor able to get into the recovery partition because I don’t get a screen booted until the desktop starts up. And these are the two methods to run diskwarrior from the USB Stick. The USB Stick does show up as a startup disc and I have tried starting up off of it, but the computer never boots this way for some reason.
To get it to work on my MacPro I used a competitor product in fact. Micromat’s Tech Tool Pro 7 has a way to create a recovery partition. And I was able to create it on one of my additional hard drives so as not to mess with the OS X recovery partition, and it allows you to install software there, so I installed Diskwarrior 5 and ran it.
Once running the new Diskwarrior worked fine, just like the old one, and in fact did not seem any faster. I do have a very full 3 TB main hard drive though, so it has a lot of files to check, but still it did not seem exceptionally faster than version 4.
A second place I run diskwarrior is at one of the offices that I work at (being freelance it isn’t always the same place, but I work here allot). And I got them to purchase a DVD of Diskwarrior 4.
Now I wanted to test Diskwarrior 5 here, to see if we could use it. Now while they do have one MacPro with a NVIDIA GTX 680 Mac Edition which I will be testing on later, they also have a QUO computing Hackintosh that I have been using mostly. Already to run Diskwarrior on it, I can’t boot from the DVD, but have to run from a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of the system SSD that has Diskwarrior 4 installed. Still I thought I would try the USB Stick.
And once again no, with the QUO it seems that I can’t hold down option to see the bootable hard drives, so I can’t boot from the USB stick to repair this system. I could install Diskwarrior on my backup, but would not do that with my serial number. I will test it later on the regular MacPro, just because I want to see if I can get Diskwarrior 5 to boot from the USB stick in any situation!
Now the one thing I have not tried is is the new Diskwarrior 5 Diskwarrior Recovery Maker, which updates the USB Flash to the latest OS that your system is, since new Macs have new boot requirements, but I know my MacPro can boot from 10.6.4, and I believe that is the starting system for any Hackintosh, so I though that would work for for the QUO.
I will updater his after I see if it works on the other more standard MacPro, but so far I have not been too impressed with Diskwarrior 5
Well I tested the Diskwarrior USB in the MacPro 4,1 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition, and it froze on the startup screen. I started it by holding down option and selecting the Diskwarrior Recovery partition, and starting up. I left it there for an hour, and the Machine was just stopped.
