[Macpartners] Macintosh Utility Software Recommendations

[Albert Willis]

My experience has been that using Disk Utility (fsck at the command 
line) handles all of the routine stuff nicely. IMHO, Disk Warrior is 
the must-have commercial utility for returning corrupted drives back 
into a usable state, even severely scrambled ones. Keep in mind that 
Symantec has dropped Norton Utilities for the Mac.

I haven't tested it yet, but the fsck_hfs command has a rebuild option 
that will rebuild a drive's catalog, similar to what Disk Warrior does. 
If you're interested, check the man pages for fsck_hfs.

There's isn't a disk utility that IS&T provides support for.  Since Mac 
OS X 10.3 shipped, there's been probably less of need for repairing 
drives since 10.3 has file system journaling turned on by default. More 
info at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=153377.

   -- Al


On Jun 25, 2004, at 1:26 PM, Rocklyn E. Clarke wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
>
> Back in the MacOS 9.x days, I relied fairly heavily on Norton 
> Utilities for my Macs.  After my transition to MacOS X (I'm currently 
> running MacOS 10.3.4), I never really settled on a Mac utility 
> software strategy.  What kinds of utilities make sense to have in a 
> MacOS X world?  What are the pros and cons of Disk Warrior, TechTool, 
> etc?
>
> Do you folks have any recommendations or cautions?  Is there an 
> official IS&T policy on this?
>
> Rocklyn E. Clarke
> Former IS Employee