By Graham K. Rogers

DiskWarrior, now updated to version 5 comes on a USB flash drive. Installing the software on the Mac is straightforward as is putting it on an external disk with OS X installed. There are options for installing on other media and the original flash drive cannot run on the latest Macs. Updating needs to be done. While putting Diskwarrior onto a Mac is quite easy, the other installation options require a little more work.

I had already updated the Applications folder on the Mac and on an external drive with OS X installed, followed by making a rescue disk on a USB flash drive. The final update required a little more care as I would need to start in the Mac's Rescue partition and make changes to the Disk Warrior flash drive, starting the process in Terminal.

DiskWarrior Flash Drive Update

The Disk Warrior flash drive was already in the USB drive, so I restarted the Mac while holding down the Command + R keys as I detailed a short while ago in an item on Startup keys. It takes a while for the Apple icon to appear. The progress bar moves slowly, then the menu panel with the four rescue options appears.

Instead of accessing these, I used the Utilities menu at the top of the screen and started Terminal. At the command line I entered,

and pressed the Enter (Return) key. The DiskWarrior panel appeared, along with the license agreement. I was asked to personalise the copy of Disk Warrior which needed my name and the serial number. This was inside the box and on the invoice. When that was accepted, the gearwheel began to spin and in less than a minute I was able to run this copy of Disk Warrior from the interface.

As I had repaired the disk using a copy I had installed on a rescue flash drive, there was nothing amiss and the identical process took only a few minutes.

I quit the process, then quit OS X Utilities and was offered the option to select a disk from the Startup Disk panel. As the Disk Warrior flash drive was shown - albeit with a 10.6.7 installation - I selected that (not recommended). After the restart, although an Apple logo appeared (small and grey not like the usual white on a black screen) there was no further progress (not even a gear-wheel) and I resorted to the power button after a few minutes. The Mac restarted correctly in the current, Yosemite after a brief delay.

To start the computer using the Disk Warrior flash drive, I would have to update the drive in the same way as I had installed the system on the rescue flash drive earlier, using Disk Warrior Recovery Maker.

I decided that for me, there would not be much point in this as I already had the utility on the external disk with OS X and on the rescue flash drive

Comments

Run occasionally if there are problems, these minor aberrations will be nipped in the bud before they develop into more serious faults that could cause untoward consequences.

The latest version of Disk Warrior ran quite quickly on the Mac and disks I tested it on, albeit these installations were not expected to be faulty in any major way. What is interesting for users is the way that Alsoft has kept up with the needs of modern Mac users - both in terms of hardware and software - and we are now able to easily install Disk Warrior on a variety of media quite quickly, although it will pay to heed the instructions. Read the Manual.

See Also:

• Disk Warrior Updated to Version 5 and Available on USB drive: (1) Opening the Box

• Disk Warrior Updated to Version 5 and Available on USB drive: (2) Installing on the Mac and External Media

• Disk Warrior Updated to Version 5 and Available on USB drive: (3) Making a Rescue Disk and Running the Repair

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.