I bought Disk Warrior and used it 4 times successfully. Then it started telling me, before replacing the directories, that to insure a failsafe replacement, that I needed to delete 98mb of 'contiguous' space for it to do so. Neither Alsoft nor Apple can tell me how to accomplish this. Alsoft tells me I can buy their optimizer and this will take care of the situation. Sounds like a scam to me. Their current Optimizer Plus works only if one has classic 9 installed. I deleted that for "contiguous space" as I never use it and see no reason that I ever would. Disk Warrior worked fine after that for one session. Now it tells me I need to delete 100mb of contiguous space to insure their failsafe replacement. If my power is interrupted during the 20 seconds it takes to replace, I lose everything on my hard drive.
Apple sent me someting that some of you might understand about partitions and all, but is Greek to me. I can send you that, if needed.
Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Humbly, a non techie, self learner, since last year,
Dan
P.S. How do I change my signature. The spelling is one letter off.

Hello,

I would be interestd in what Apple sent you for partition information.

What they are trying to do is have you optimize your hard drive, meaning re-arrange your files on the hard drive so that they are fragment free, and nicely laid out for the OS to work with. While this can speed some things up on your computer, it is not a complete necessity.

Windows comes with an internal disk defragmenter and Linux uses a file system (ext3) that minimizes fragmentation. It has always been a third-party addition for Mac OS (7,8,9,X) to have a defragmenter around.

Since going to X 2 years ago now or so, I have not defragmented my hard drive. I am not under any pressure to do so in the future. I would leave it alone, and enjoy your Mac.

Christian

Thanks for the reply and info.
I went RV camping with my only Mac friend in my area yesterday and he told me the Norton defrag utilitiy works. My need for such a utility only arose after I bought Disk Warrior and it's need for contiguous free space to temporarily store everything on my hard drive while it writes and optimizes the new directories. Seems that maybe I shouldn't have shelled out over $90 for Disk Warrior in the first place. But as much as I surf the web, things get sluggish and sometimes erratic after a while. Before DW, I regulary used Mac Janitor and Onyx. Maybe I should just stick with them.
I will send you what Apple sent me, by way of your other contact info, since I don't know if it will fit here.
Thanks again for your input.
Sincerely, Dan

I am getting a new mac mini in the next few days. I have been on os 8.6 a long time and have a lot to learn. I am trying to decide if I need to buy a disc utility for defragmenting and finding minor issues. I have used norton utilities and have really liked it, but don't know what the hot software is to buy now. I am going to leave the 80 gig drive inside the mini pretty much empty except for the OS and maybe photoshop / office and appleworks. I just purchased a 500 gig 7200 firewire drive / maxtor one touch and will likely install a hub and at least one more mirrored fast hard drive. My older system uses mirrored pairs of drives for os and software and data ,and finished work in matched pairs of fast wide scsi 10,000 rpm drives. It freaks me out a bit thinking of a computer with only two hard drives which is what I will start with- as I assemble out of the box soon.

I am used to having spare computers with matched mirrored hard drives allready warmed up, and having pairs of everything so that a single failure leaves me with zero issues. The mac mini is quite a different machine for me, but I could not afford to duplicate my current setup with modern gear.

If anyone can suggest a disc utility I would appreciate it. I believe my new mini will ship with OS X / 10.4 whatever the heck animal apple calls that ....

Tiger.

You pretty much have 2 choices:

Disk Warrior

Tech Tool Pro

They are about the same in effectiveness and you'll probably find an equal amount of people glorifying one and decrying the other. Are they worth it? Yes I think so, but you can wait until you actually need to before you spend the cash on it.

As an alternative, you should look into SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your mini's HD onto your external as a backup.