None of the suggestions I found on various Mac OS forums helped much. Then I tried booting the installation disk that came with the system. I tried booting the Snow Leopard installation CD. The utility couldn't verify or repair the disk structure. Since the system was running Mac OS from the USB drive, I first tried the Disk Utility that is part of Mac OS. No problem, I thought, I'll just search the internet for suggestions on what to do to fix the disk structure. Drive Genius, obviously irritated by the interruption, did quite a number on my hard drive's directory structure. As one might expect, interrupting a disk optimization utility is bad.
The Mac OS X system update utility unexpectedly kicked in and interrupted the Drive Genius process. This time, something unusual happened during the Drive Genius' optimization run. Although everything has worked out time and again, I guess there's always a first time.
Everything has worked just fine in the past. Since my system is backed up using Mac OS X's time machine, my files are backed up to a local file server and really important files are replicated to other machine in my local network, I've blithely ignore those ominous warnings. As one would expect from a product that messed around with the filesystem, Drive Genius presents an ominous warning screen before starting the optimization process. When it's time to optimize my boot drive, I boot up the system from the USB drive and use Drive Genius to optimize the system's hard disk. So, I built a Mac OS X image on a USB drive and loaded Drive Genius on that USB drive. I use that software to defragment the boot drive on a regular basis and have been happy with the overall system performance.ĭue to the fact that Mac OS X doesn't offer some of the file system primitives found in some other operating systems, it is impossible to defragment the boot drive without booting from some other drive. So, I acquired Drive Genius from Prosoft Engineering. I've got a little story for you today of disaster and how Apple's customer service helped me get quickly back on line.ĭefrag or not to defrag, that is the questionĪlthough Apple tells people that Mac OS X's journaled file system is so good that it doesn't need defragmentation, I don't believe it.