Today's Buzz: Disk First Aid 8.2

The newly released Disk First Aid 8.2 has been the number one topic in the mailbag for the past few days. While the email tends to raise more questions than it answers, here is what people are reporting:

Endless loop/freeze/crash Several readers report problems with DFA checking a startup disk. Although detailsvary, the primary symptom is that DFA will enter into an endless loop while checking the drive. Hitting Cancel usually breaks out of it. In some cases, a Force Quit (Command-Option-Escape) or a restart was needed. Al Atkinson found that allocating more RAM to DFA fixed the problem. Another reader said that deleting the Preferences file from the previous version of Disk First Aid did the trick.

Other applications running Several readers report getting a message from DFA that says: "The Repair operation cannot take place while other applications are running. Click Continue to automatically quit all other running applications. Click Cancel to leave your disk untouched." However, as far as they can tell, they have no other applications open. It's likely that DFA simply considers the Finder to be an open application and so it will always report this message. However, Dennis Collier reports that starting up with extensions off eliminated ths message. This suggests a background application (not visible in the Application menu) may be the cause. In any case, I would not worry too much about this.

Not an HFS disk Several readers report that DFA refuses to check a drive, giving a message that says: "This is not an HFS disk." This problem appeared particularly likely if your disk was formatted with Hard Disk ToolKit 2.5.2 - but even here it did not happen on all partitions. Nicola Gervasi writes that disabling PC Exchange eliminated the error message for him.

Custom Icons Many readers confirmed the minor glitch with icons I described last time. Simply restarting (sometimes with rebuilding the desktop) invariably fixed it.

Note: As is almost always the case, not all readers report these problems. In fact, several readers are so pleased with the increased performance of Disk First Aid that they are ready to give up on using third-party repair utilities.