VolumeWorks: Partition corruption

Geoff Odhner reports a serious issue with SubRosaSoft's VolumeWorks utility, which is designed to allow you to repartition your hard drive without the need to reformat:

"I bought [VolumeWorks] and tried to use it to rearrange partitions on my disk. During an Edit operation it hung, I went to bed, then when I got up in the morning hoping to see it finally finished, the program had quit. The partition it had tried to expand was corrupted, and I could not mount it, move it, or delete it. I could not reinitialize the entire drive with Disk Utility, because the main partition map was corrupted. After several tries booting off of my Firewire drive and off of my DiskWarrior CD and back again off of the Firewire drive, eventually Disk Utility managed to work things loose in the main partition map, and I was able to reformat the drive from scratch, and reinstall all my data and programs from my backup on my FireWire drive. I never got a satisfactory response from SubRosaSoft, however. Once I got my system recovered, they didn't respond to my email reporting what I had to go through to get there. The money I spent on it was wasted, as I bought it for that specific task. Since it can't handle that straightforward task, and since they don't seem eager to gather information on exactly how it failed, for correcting the problem, I have not confidence in the product or the company. I regretfully give them a strong thumbs down. Much better to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your files to a Firewire drive, rearrange your partitions, then move your files back, in my opinion."

We occasionally receive questions from readers asking if such "partition without reformatting" utilities are safe to use. The answer is that it depends on exactly how the utility is performing the procedure, but since you're actually altering the partition map on the drive, if you're going to try one of these utilities you should make sure your drive is in good shape (using utilities like Apple's Disk Utility and Alsoft's DiskWarrior) and back up all the files on the drive before editing partitions. On a more practical level, it should be pointed out that if you're taking such precautions, you could just as easily erase the drive, repartition it using Disk Utility, and then restore your files from backup.

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