I'm new to the Mac so I'm still learning about disk maintenance etc. After a number of freezes and forced shut downs due to using several USB devices along with Parallels; OS X would no longer start up. I could see the apple logo and the turning icon but after several seconds the screen would just go black. A hardware check wih my OS X install disk turned up nothing. But using Disk Utility discovered a sibling link problem that could not be fixed. I called AppleCare and they were sympathetic and professional but said that the problem was something that Disk Utility was not robust enough to fix. They suggested I try a third party tool or that I would have to reformat and start over. Thankfully I found Drive Genius!

Unfortunately, at first, the Drive Genius CD crashed the system on start up. Exploring other possibilities, I thought I would try re-initializing the hard drive and downloading the demo version of Data Rescue II to see if I could restore one of my recent projects. (Data Rescue was mentioned in the Drive Genius documentation). During the download process, I left a comment on the download form about Drive Genius crashing and within a few minutes someone from support at ProSoft actually phoned me!

He gave me a link to the newest beta version of Drive Genius which hadn't been released yet - After burning the image to a CD (on another Mac I have), it launched perfectly and I was able to do a Repair/Rebuild. From what I can tell it completely fixed my hard drive and I haven't lost any data.

If it wasn't for the pro-active phone call of the technician I may have reformatted my drive and lost days of work re-installing and configuring all my software.

Thanks to ProSoft and especially to the technician who cared! :)