Installing Diskwarrior on a bootable USB?

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Level 1

13 points

Installing Diskwarrior on a bootable USB?

My friend's Intel iMac has been playing up recently and after verifying the disk was informed of an invalid sibling link.

Now the iMac won't boot up - just the spinning gear and was advised to get a copy of Diskwarrior.

My local Apple stores don't stock the software,

Micro Anvika is now nonexistent

and Amazon estimated a 4-week delivery time.

I've downloaded a copy of Alsoft's disk warrior from their website on the understanding that I could boot up the iMac from a USB flash drive (which i've also just bought 16gb Sandisk).

Instructions online are varied and many talk about partitioning the flash drive three times to load up the three partitions on the Diskwarrior disk (I don't have three partitions or the disk, just the one disk image, which I've 'restored' onto the flash drive, now when I plug in my flash drive, Disk Warrior the image appears.

But I can't boot up this mac and I'm not sure what to do.

Posted on Jan 18, 2013 5:47 AM

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Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

83,561 points

Jan 18, 2013 6:10 AM in response to thomas200

Before even using Disk Warrior, is your data backed up? A bad sibling link can be a sign of a hard drive going bad or a bad directory. Disk Warrior can hasten its demise if it is the former, but will fix the problem if it is the latter.

Hence why you need to know if your data is backed up before you do anything rash. There are data recovery tools much better than Disk Warrior if it is not.

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Answer 2

thomas200 Author

Level 1

13 points

Jan 18, 2013 6:13 AM in response to a brody

It's not my data fortunately but no, I believe it's not been backed up recently.

But I thought Diskwarrior allowed you to recover files before doing anything rash?

I will happily take any and all suggestions. At the moment it's just an expensive metal box that gets hot.

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Answer 3

a brody

Level 10

83,561 points

Jan 18, 2013 6:16 AM in response to thomas200

Disk Warrior can recover some data, but it does so in the process of repairing the directory which remaps how the hard drive finds the data on the drive. The process of remapping is all fine and good on a physically healthy hard drive whose directory got munged because it wasn't properly shut down numerous times or something else writing to the boot block. But a dying hard drive is an entirely different beast. That's why I wrote this tip.

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Answer 4

thomas200 Author

Level 1

13 points

Jan 18, 2013 7:00 AM in response to thomas200

Hmmm, me thinks you're right.

My main priority would then be to get as much off of there as possible. But i'm concerned now about trying to do that without screwing anything up even more.

I had a look at your tips...what would you suggest? Leave it to an expert to try and recover or have a crack at it myself?

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