I want to share my experience of disk maintenance in hopes it will help others.
My G-5 tower was getting slower and slower, so I thought I would walk through the usual routine of DiskWarrior first, TechTools second, then Cocktail at the end. DiskWarrior immediately said the directory was too badly damaged to repair, so it baked out of the routine. This was late at night so I emailed them my problem In the meantime I decided to use TechTools pro, which went through all the routines and even said it was rebuilding the directory. When finished the computer would no longer boot, I always got the dimmed screen that said to do a hard restart with the on/off button, each time getting the grayed screen. Now I had a mess, could not start the machine at all, unless I held down the option key to get to the blue screen where I could at least eject the TechTool disk. I should learn, this is the second time that TechTools had made a machine inoperable, I will eventually catch on. For those of you with Tiger, there is an updated version of both DiskWarrior and TechTools that you must use. Had the directory not been so badly damaged the DiskWarrior would have backed out and given me a message to upgrade, the TechTools disk didn't, it went ahead and did the work without telling me I had a version that would not work with my operating system. The education from all this came when I called Alsoft (DiskWarrior) and left a message for tech support, giving them my problem. They called me back within an hour and walked me through the innards of the program, WOW it is great. I had to use various key combinations to get into the advanced portions of the program, I had to give them readings so they could then give me a key to type in, which allowed the software to bypass the bad part of the disk, and then I could do a rebuild of the directory and now I am running fine. The tech support guy said that TechTools was good for testing hardware performance, but directory rebuilding was best done by DiskWarrior, I can't agree more. He also said that most "slowing" of the machine anymore is not due to fragmentation, it is the directory that is getting bad, and most of the speed issues can be corrected by a rebuilding of the directory. So, should you think you are to a brick wall, it may be good to get the Alsoft folks involved if you think the problem is with the directory. John R. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be October 25 at Pitt Academy, 6010 Preston Highway. | The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
