![]() ![]() If you choose "repair automatically" in the Preferences dialog, Norton will examine and repair all your disks in sequence. ![]() Typing Command-A selects all currently-mounted volumes. Seasoned veterans can choose which tests are run on which disks and how extensive they are.Ī great feature is the ability to run Disk Doctor almost unattended. Beginning users need only select which disks to examine and choose whether or not to repair the problems encountered. Norton Disk Doctor and the other components of the Norton Utilities package adapt nicely to an individual user's abilities. ![]() ![]() A better solution is to run a disk-repair program every week or so, to make sure your data remains intact and files aren't disappearing. Corrupt files will be backed up along with the rest of your data (You do backup, don't you?), but you won't know which backup contains the last good copy of your important file. Often, this happens if your Mac crashes while writing to the disk. Since you don't access every file on your hard disk every day, files can become corrupt without your knowledge. Many times, you won't notice them until they get very serious. Some problems occur during normal computer use, causing crashes or disk errors. Disk Doctor checks for bad blocks, errors in the directory structure, and problems with individual files. Just select which disks you want checked and click the "Examine" button. It was so bad even Norton couldn't save it." In fact, I have very rarely encountered a hard disk problem Norton couldn't fix. In fact, Disk Doctor is so well-known, it is often referred to simply as "Norton." For example, "My hard drive crashed today. I think this lack of competition has kept a Very Nice product from maturing into an Excellent one.ĭisk Doctor Norton Utilities' most important component is Norton Disk Doctor. Norton Utilities' only competition has been Apple's marginally-useful Disk First Aid (which ships with every copy of Mac OS) and the new DiskEssentials utility (which hasn't been around long enough for anyone to swear by yet). It has long been the flagship for all Macintosh disk-repair software. You might search for "bad sector repair" on some of the main software sites like, ,, and (on Major Geeks you might just go through all of their Drive Utilities).Norton Utilities is a suite of eleven different utilities for maintaining, repairing, and giving information about your disks. It's not a very good looking program, but it is actually very nice.įloppies are pretty much the same, although those utils can at least allow you to get your data off of them. Unfortunately I don't think there's a download, you just have to get it at a store that sells software, like OfficeDepot. just keep an eye on the overview screen).įix-It Utilities will do everything you want in one package, but it's not free. I also like HDD Health for real-time monitoring of hard drives, it will alert you when they're about to die by reporting the drive's internal diagnostic info (although HDD Health will also report positive gains, so don't panic on every alert. so you're much better off just replacing the drive. If you have a harddrive that's dropping sectors, the chances are it will continue to do so. If that starts happening, it's a good idea to try to figure out what the problem is, why it happened, and at least format, if not replace the harddrive. It won't do repairs, but the thing is that when you start getting file system corruption it's going to be very difficult to fix it completely. Here's a good bunch of freeware hard drive utilities.įor "fixing" bad floppies, here's a couple. ![]()
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