Disk Repair Tools for Intel Macs?

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Anyone know of any good Disk Repair Tools that work on Intel Based Macs and will support USB/Firwire Drives?

I have a USB drive that I use to store data, images and backups of my user folder from my Mac's internal HD. The drive was acting up a few weeks ago and I determined that the usb enclosure was bad. I replaced that and was able to retreive all of my data to a backup location. Today, I could not mount the drive, but the system could see it in Disk Utility. I was not able to run a repair on the disk because it said it had errors. So since I have a backup of the drive, I did a quick erase which just rewrites the directory structure and the drive mounted fine.

I'm going to use the drive with caution since it could be a media or drive hardware failure, but with what happened, it leads me to beleive that a decent disk utility might have corrected the problem and saved me the time of copying my data back to the drive.

From what I have read, DiskWarrior is great, but does not yet support the Intel Macs. So, anyone have first hand experience with a tool that does work on the Intel Macs?
 
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There's techtool. Techtool Pro 4.5 is universal.

Check out there website:MicroMat
 
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sbatson said:
I'm going to use the drive with caution since it could be a media or drive hardware failure. . . .
Disk Utility runs a S.M.A.R.T. check. I don't know whether it could run a separate check on an external drive. (Disk Utility's Help, when I typed in smart, suggests that it will.) My machine's drive has four partitions, and I have to click on the main-drive icon to verify its status. Your drive would have to have SMART built in.

There's a freeware app called SMARTReporter that runs continuous checks on drives. I don't know whether you can set the thing up to work on an external drive, and I don't think it's universal binary. But if you can run it through Rosetta and still have it show up in the menu bar, you'll know at all times (hopefully) whether the drive is dying.

You can set it up so it'll send an email to you if anything's wrong, so maybe it would run through Rosetta even without the icon.
 
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Brown Study said:
Disk Utility runs a S.M.A.R.T. check. I don't know whether it could run a separate check on an external drive. (Disk Utility's Help, when I typed in smart, suggests that it will.) My machine's drive has four partitions, and I have to click on the main-drive icon to verify its status. Your drive would have to have SMART built in.

There's a freeware app called SMARTReporter that runs continuous checks on drives. I don't know whether you can set the thing up to work on an external drive, and I don't think it's universal binary. But if you can run it through Rosetta and still have it show up in the menu bar, you'll know at all times (hopefully) whether the drive is dying.

You can set it up so it'll send an email to you if anything's wrong, so maybe it would run through Rosetta even without the icon.

All of the SMART stuff was greyed out, so I could not use it for the external drive. I think I read something on the web when searching google that indicated that the SMART tools would not work with external drives, only on drives actually connected to the IDE BUS.

I'll checkout SMARTReporter, but if the drive needs to be on the BUS, it's probably not going to work.

For the time being, none of this is going to matter, the drive started acting up again. I'm pretty sure that it's failed completely. But I'm going to try reformatting it and testing it on my PC where I have a lot more tools at my disposal currently.

thanks.
 

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