How to Use DiskWarrior on your Mac

Have you noticed your Mac is running less smooth lately? Are these little nuances beginning to annoy you - takes longer for an application to open, applications are crashing and things just don't seem right. If you have a copy of Alsoft's DiskWarrior, you can make your Mac right again by running this utility on your start-up drive.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Apple Computer
• A copy of DiskWarrior

1. 
    
   Option Key Startup

   Place your CD copy of Disk Warrior into our CD/DVD drive. Shut down or restart your Mac. Hold down either the "C" key - this will allow you to automatically start up using the DiskWarrior CD - or hold down the Option key while booting up again. The Option key hold will show a list of any hard drives that have a bootable System folder on their partitions. Select DiskWarrior and click the Arrow key. This will ensure you start-up from the Disk Warrior CD. **THIS DISK PROCESS WILL TAKE A WHILE TO START UP**, so don't be worried if you get the Apple screen with a long spin icon on it. 5 to 8 minutes is not unusual.

2. 
    
   graph button

   Once DiskWarrior loads, you will see this accompanying box. Any start-up disks will be listed in the pull-down menu. Select your start-up disk you wish to run DiskWarrior on and click the Graph button.

3. 
    
   graph

   The Graph button produces a graph box similar to this one. It will show the fragmentation of the disk drive you have selected for this utility. Your goal is to get 0% files out of order. This screenshot shows this hard drive as 39% out of order. This is the "before" graph look. Once you run the Rebuild portion of DiskWarrior, you can come back here and review how your disk looks after the utility has been run. Click the red circle in the left-hand corner of this window to close this window and return to the above Graph screen. Click the Rebuild button.

4. 
    
   report

   The Rebuild procedure occurs in steps. Once it is complete, the process will present a report to you, showing you anything that may have to be fixed. Click Replace. This will fix your problems. You will be asked if you wish to save a report of what needs to be completed. Save a report if you wish.

5. 
    
   replaced graph

   After the Replace procedure has occurred, you will be taken back to the screenshot in Step #2. Click on the Graph button again. Now you should see a much better looking graph - smoother and there should be less percentage of files out of order (0%). Depending on the severity of your drive's files, you may need to run Rebuild twice. Keep running the Rebuild process until you get to 0% out of order.

6. 
    
   rebuild

   Once you have completed the Rebuild portion of DiskWarrior, you can run the DiskWarrior Files option so you can repair permissions and check on files and folders on your start-up drive. This process also takes more than a few minutes, if your hard drive is full. This process will repair any permissions that are not correct and give you a report of any files that may be damaged. You will have the option to save this report.

7. Once you have completed running DiskWarrior, restart your Mac. Hold down the mouse button when you restart the Mac so the DiskWarrior CD pops out of the CD/DVD Rom drive. Your start-up disk's bootable System Folder will start your Mac for you. You are ready to work again.

Tips & Warnings

• It is always suggested that you have a backup of the drive you will be running DiskWarrior on before you run this utility. An very unstable system may not be able to start back up again if you run this utility. Please us caution when using this utility. Speaking from personal experience, DiskWarrior has only ever helped me many times over. And there have been times when I did not have a backup of a hard drive that I ran this utility on and everything turned out fine. Please use at your own discretion.

Resources

• DiskWarrior

[mark1967]

on 1/11/2009 nice pics, awesome, please rate some of mine.

[listenhere101]

on 10/30/2008 great! 5 stars!