Disk Warrior 4

[downingp]

I have been doing some reading on this forum about Disk Warrior. From what I have read, it seemed like a good program to get.
My question is, how do I use it? I installed it onto my internal hard drive, so now disk warrior says I can't rebuild the disk because disk warrior is installed on the hard drive. Disk warrior also says it can't rebuild my external drive because it is in FAT32, MSDOS mode (BTW, isn't there a gb limit on a FAT32 drive? I have over 300 gb of music on this external drive)

Anyone care to help me out? Thanks.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Yoiu can't repair the drive you are booted from or running the repair utility on. Boot from the DiskWarrior CD first, then repair.

There is no Gb limit on FAT32 drives (well there is but it is an absurd big number) The 32 Gb 'limit' is an artificial limitation of the Windows formatting software to force people to use NTFS instead.

 

[MikeTheC]

Answers to your post's questions.

1. Yes, DiskWarrior is (and has been right from the get-go) an awesome program to have.
2. You use the CD it comes on to boot from, and then run all diagnostics and repairs from it.
3. While I have to admit some surprise that DW 4 doesn't support Microsoft's disk formats, my guess is that their focus is solely on Apple disk formats.
4. FAT32 leads a rather tortured existence. Let me try to break it down for you a little.
   • FAT32 as a filesystem has an ultimate limit of 2TB of partition space.
   • FAT32 has a maximum individual file size limit of 4GB - 1 byte, so technically a file has to be less than 4GB.
   • Win98/98SE/ME allow FAT32 partition sizes of only (IIRC) about 127GB.
   • WinXP will support FAT32 partition sizes larger than that, but will not allow you to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.
5. As the prior poster said, it's all down to Microsoft trying to push everyone away from the FAT series of filesystems and over to NTFS.
6. All of the prior maze of technicalities notwithstanding, for the average person FAT32 is still the best choice of filesystem when needing total multi-platform storage media compatibility (i.e. Win98+, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, etc.)

Hope this helps clear things up for you.

 

[downingp]

so instead of installing the program on the internal hard drive, I want to use the cd only?

I mainly want to be able to protect my music on my external hard drive. I guess that means I need to reformat the external drive?

 

[MikeTheC]

Yup, pretty much. Programs like DiskWarrior (in particular) and TechTool Pro (to a lesser extent) are best left "uninstalled" in the traditional sense.

And yes, if you want to safeguard your music data on your Mac and (obviously) using Mac OS-based disk utility software, you'll need to re-format your external HDD as Mac OS Extended Journaled.

 

[downingp]

thanks for all your help.