I was able to access and run DiskWarrior using the OS X Recovery partition from both Macs.įor each drive attached to your Mac, you can quickly see the Directory Optimization Index. On my 13″ Retina Macbook Pro, however, the boot sequence stalled at the Apple logo for nearly 5 minutes until I was forced to reboot. On my seven year old Mac Pro, the Flash drive booted up without any issue. My first impressions of DiskWarrior 5 are pretty good, despite a minor hiccup or two. It’s backwards compatible with all Macs running 10.5.8 or later, supporting even PowerPC Macs(!)ĭiskWarrior won’t win any design awards, but it looks good and (more importantly) gets the job done.It’s easy to see the efficiency of your drive’s directory structure thanks to its updated interface.It’s 64-bit, allowing it to run on much larger drives.Alternatively, DiskWarrior 5 can now also run from the OS X Recovery partition (unless your startup drive has partition table damage).

First and foremost, the application now comes on a bootable Flash drive, making those long, painful boot times from disc a thing of the past. When Alsoft announced a newly minted DiskWarrior 5.0 a few weeks ago, I was pleased. As such, an entire generation of modern Mac users may not even be aware that a powerful program like DiskWarrior even exists.

Despite its age, DiskWarrior 4 still works with modern Macs, as long as you either have a DVD drive attached to your Mac (to load the program from disc) or you have DiskWarrior installed on a separate bootable hard drive. (Typing that last sentence makes me feel even older.) Long time Mac users will note that DiskWarrior is 30 years old, shipping shortly after the first Macs were released.Ĭomparing its lengthy history with present day computing, the previous version of DiskWarrior feels like a relic from a bygone era. To put some perspective: DiskWarrior 4.0 is so old it actually shipped on a CD. The venerable Mac disk repair utility had its last major update (version 4.0) nearly 8 years ago, when it was re-engineered to work with Intel-based Macs. Alsoft’s DiskWarrior was getting so long in the tooth, I thought the program had been quietly put out to pasture.

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