Drive Genius - 1.1.5

Used DG 2.2.1 yesterday to try to defragment a disk under Snow Leopard so Boot Camp could partition it for a Windows installation. The defragment option ran for about 3 minutes before crashing in the code that draws the ridiculously gratuitous graphics of the spinning disk, flying 1's and 0's, and so on. Naturally, being interrupted in the process of shuffling data around didn't lead to a happy result. Fortunately I wasn't willing to run this program without a complete backup, so I was able to recover the disk. I've never had any defragment issues with Drive Genius 1.5.3 (no gratuitous graphics) despite frequent use. Felt like an idiot for telling someone I had a great program that would let us skip the backup/restore method of disk defragmentation! I'll be sure to turn off the animation next time, if there is a next time.

Prosoft staff: don't ask me to contact you -- go flog the engineer that did the buggy disk drive animation, and the marketing weenie who insisted on putting it in the product!

Attempting an upgrade to OS 10..5.8 on a G4 Powerbook, software update reported a lack of space. I therefore set Drive Genius to look for unwanted localisations and unneeded universal binaries and cache and temporary files and went to bed. The next morning the drive was dead and proved irrecoverable by Disk Utility and Disk Warrior which could not even see the Partition. I can only presume that DG drove the hard drive into the ground with its scanning. This was not a new machine but the HD failure at this time was too much of coincidence for me. A most unfortunate and expensive outcome from the first attempt at using this costly software. I would not recommend.