We don’t usually buy hard drive utility programs like Drive Genius from Prosoft Engineering until our backs are against the wall and our Mac have the equivalent of the flu. Just such a scenario happened to me the other day, so I put Drive Genius through its paces. This robust drive fix-it program, recently updated to version 2.2, works with all versions of Tiger, Leopard, and the yet to be released Snow Leopard.

While you might think $100 is expensive for one program, Drive Genius contains 12 modules, which boils down to little more than $8 per module. The modules include: Defragment, Repair, Clone, Repartition On-The-Fly, Scan, Initialize, Shred, Information report, Integrity Check, Sector Editor, Benchtest, and the new DriveSlim. While some of these modules are recommended for hardware experts, such as Sector Editor, anyone can use the majority of them to cure what ails your machine.

The Result First

The Information module provides a complete description of your hard drive without any fear of data loss, but the balance of the modules are best run after you make a copy of your data, in case of unexpected problems. My test started with setting up a new hard drive, so that I could make a clone or exact duplicate of my startup drive, before I ran any tests.

First, I ran Apple’s Disk Utility and fixed permissions, plus verified my internal Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard startup drive. It passed those tests, but I’d experienced a strange system lockup a few days earlier and wanted to investigate that problem further. After running most of the modules in Drive Genius, I decided my problem results from too little RAM and not any hard drive issues, but my drive is clean and mean now. While I did run into a few minor issues, most of the modules in Drive Genius 2 worked flawlessly.

Drive Genius In Action

When you launch Drive Genius, a window with each module’s icon appears. You run the mouse over each icon to identify it, but no other information appears at that point. A convenient popup menu exists on the top right also. At this time, I had Drive Genius 2.1 and my iMac ran very slowly off the disc, so I installed it on my drive, applied the free update to Drive Genius 2.2, and ran it right off the internal disk. I received the updated DVD a few days later, and found that it ran much faster from the new disc.



Main Window
I used an Apricorn Aegis Desktop 1.5TB drive to backup my startup drive, which although marketed to Mac users, comes formatted as FAT 32. I reformatted the drive with Drive Genius Initialize with a GUID Partition Table. I have two small complaints with the Format display. First, the Volume name automatically appears as “Drive Genius,” and I think “Untitled” should appear instead. Second, the Drives/Volumes choice is not as clear as in Drive Genius 1.5. Instead of appearing as two tabs at the top left of the screen, the switch appears on the bottom left, as highlighted in red below. I missed this option at first, because it’s not obviously a clickable choice.



Format Window
It reported that the drive formatted, but I couldn’t tell if it was journaled and case-sensitive. As it turns out, you can find out these particulars in the Information module, but I discovered that by accident much later.



I decided to reformat the drive in Leopard’s Disk Utility, but ran into a documented problem (http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=2009040312364071), that made the drive unrecognizable. I had to switch back to Tiger and use Disk Utility from that disk to partition the drive and reformat it as a Mac OS X Extended Journaled. Drive Genius might have formatted it correctly, but I didn’t immediately see that evidence. I wish the program came with a written manual, which might have answered some of my questions more easily, because you cannot access the help while a module is in progress. In addition, the online help just opens the included PDF manual, which I don’t like as much as a normal built-in help file.

by ilene hoffman, reviews editor, Editor