Drive 10: Volume Structure repair problems reported

Regarding yesterday's look at Micromat's Drive 10 utility, we received two replies from readers. They suggest that Drive 10 still has some growing pains, especially when using its Repair/Rebuild Volume Structure option:

Steven Mattson had an incident where Drive 10 unsuccessfully tried to fix a problem:

"After getting repeated 'crashes' in OS X, crash, I ran Drive 10. Sure enough, it reported Volume Structure damage. When I elected to repair the drive, it took over twenty minutes. During intermittent periods, the Cancel button would stop flashing, the barber pole progress bar would stop and the process appeared to be frozen. After a few minutes, the process continued. After the repair was completed, the system rebooted automatically. I ran Drive 10 again. Structures were still reported as damaged. Using DiskWarrior (while booting from Mac OS 9) finally fixed the problem. After doing this, Drive 10 no longer reported structure damage."

Mike McLaughlin writes of a more serious problem following an attempt by Drive 10 to repair a volume:

"Drive 10's Volume Structure test did find a problem on one of my partitions, so I tried to let it repair the problem. The partition is used for backups, and contained about 63GB of files including 2 backups of System Folders. The repair flattened the directory structure of the 2 System Folder backups, so all of the sudden I had 22,500 files at the root level of the partition. Let me tell you, the Finder does not like to see that many files in one place. OS X Server's Finder didn't want to show any of the files, but I may not have given it enough time. I rebooted in 9.2 and tried to clean up the mess there. The Finder still was incredibly slow, and refused to work with more than 20 or 30 files at once. It would let me move about 30 to the trash, then the Finder would crash and I would have to force it to quit. Then I could empty the Trash and move on to the next 30 files. I had to reboot the system several times as well. Finally I was able to trash all of the files and the Finder was happy again. Luckily Drive 10 only mangled backup files, which I was willing to delete to get the Finder to run normally again."

Update: Larry Hicok suggested that bypassing the Finder and instead using a utility such as Utility Dog: "A simple Find would have loaded all files into a window in maybe one minute, where they could have been sorted into smaller folders, or trashed very quickly. I commonly work with folders with up to 32,000 files in them, and have no problems."