Optimization | Drive Genius | Catastrophic Defrag Fail

Drive Genius

Storage management: maintain, manage, optimize.

Version: 2.2.1

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Catastrophic Defrag Fail

Feedback Type: Review

Contributed by: ThirdOption Monday, August 17 2009 @ 04:56 PM PDT

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Over One Year

Recommend Product: NO

Paid for upgrade to version 2.2.

Attempted to defrag Leopard partition, failed within five seconds.

This catastrophically damaged the B-Tree, and corrupted the Partition Table. Neither Drive Genius nor Apple's Disk Utility could then see the partition in question. Thus, Drive Genius could not repair what it had broken.

My old version of DiskWarrior was able to find the partition (now labelled only as "Unknown"). It had to recover files by manually scanning the partition and recreating them. The original file structure was lost. The operating system install was ruined, and a reinstall failed. (The hard drive itself is fine, SMART verified, passes all tests. Never an issue with it.)

I was attempting to do maintenance to clean up my system prior to starting a new job. Now I have to reconstruct a relatively complex install of both OSX, utilities and apps, at this most stressful time.

It does not matter how pretty your interface is, if your app can do this much damage.

Terrible, terrible fail. I do not trust Drive Genius.

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2 of 2 users found this helpful.

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Comments

Please contact our Technical Support Department - Prosoft Engineering

Hello,

This is David from Prosoft Customer Support. We have not had any reports of issues with the Defrag tool in Drive Genius in our latest update. I would like to ask you to contact our Support Department so we can get some more information about your system. You may contact us between 7AM and 5PM, PST Monday to Friday at 925-426-6306.

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Tuesday, August 18 2009 @ 09:25 AM PDT

Catastrophic Defrag Fail - terryzx

I also had a similar problem. It defraged the drive and then the computer ran so slow it was worthless and I had to reinstall everything. I also do NOT trust that defrag.

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Friday, August 28 2009 @ 02:14 PM PDT

Catastrophic Defrag Fail - Simon Charlie

The exact same thing happened to me, I had installed snow leopard, then decided that some of my major applications weren't supported. So I did an archive and install of leopard (10.5), then combo updated to 10.5.8.
Then to "tidy" things up a bit, I ran defrag from the bootable 2.2 DVD. I came into work the next day, to find the defrag had failed, so I restarted, and BANG! got a blank screen with the old flashing "?", indicating the mac couldn't find the system!
No problem, I thought! I'll run disk utility from my leopard DVD. this failed immediatley, something to do with the catalogue B tree. It wouldn't let me repair permissions either. Luckily I had a Disk Warrior 4.1 boot disk, which showed some fatal errors, but Disk Warrior managed to rebuild and replace the damaged directory. After restarting everything back to normal.

I have used Drive Genius since version 1.5.3 and had no problems, but there seems to be something amiss with 2.2, and would be warery of running it again on my mac.

iMac (8,1) 4GB RAM, 10.5.8

thanks
Simon

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Thursday, September 03 2009 @ 06:34 AM PDT