Alsoft removes Disk First Aid patches

Alsoft removes patches Re Alsoft's patches for Disk First Aid (mentioned here last time): Given the recent situation where Aladdin asked a developer to withdraw his "home-made" patch for StuffIt Expander, I was a bit surprised that Alsoft would, in a similar fashion, release a patch for Apple software. I asked Alsoft whether they had contacted Apple about this (or vice versa). Initially, they replied that Alsoft had not yet "heard anything negative from Apple." I guess they finally did hear. The patches have now been removed. Here is the Alsoft statement:

Alsoft developed patchers to rectify this bug. Apple is now working on this problem and they have asked us to remove the patchers from our web site until they perform their own tests on the patched software. We have supplied Apple with the information we collected and we are working with them to eliminate the bug for all Mac users.

Reader reports For those that did obtain the patches, most (including myself) have found that the patched file(s) seem to work well. However, a few users did find problems:

"I ran the utility on an iMac that I knew had an incorrect volume header block. The patched Disk First Aid was now unable to dismount the volume in order to execute the repair! The application would discover the error but then give a message that the repair could not be completed while other applications were open (there were no other applications open)." (David Manley)

Dwight Sheets found that his copy of Disk First Aid would actually freeze at the point that it attempted to dismount the volume.

Update: Replies to reader reports

Ted Thibodeau suggests, based on his experience, that these problems may be due to a bug in the unpatched version of DFA.

Alsoft's Joe Muscara similarly states:

"We patch only one line of code in only one routine that checks the validity of directory record key lengths. This routine has absolutely nothing to do with the ability of Disk First Aid to unmount a disk or perform any other function. These users would have had the same problem with an unpatched version of Disk First Aid running under identical conditions. Since their release, Disk First Aid versions 8.2 and later have been widely reported to produce different results when run more than once consecutively.

One explanation for the inability to unmount a disk for repair is that some file is open by an extension or some background application running. If a user attempted to run Disk First Aid from a Mac OS CD and successfully repaired the disk in question, the user may have attributed this to the unpatched version being successful over the patched version. However, running from a CD the user would have a completely different startup environment without extensions and background applications."