Drive Genius is an OS X utility designed to provide unsurpassed storage management.

Featuring an easy-to-use interface, Drive Genius is packed with powerful tools such as a drive optimizer, a comprehensive repair facility for analyzing, repairing and rebuilding volumes, plus excellent testing capabilities with media surface scanning, performance benchmarking and data integrity checking.

It can be used to initialize drives, create and delete partitions, and erases them securely as per Department of Defense's standard. Drive Genius can also hide partitions and duplicate volumes or drives swiftly.

Last but not least, Drive Genius features advanced tools for resizing and moving of volumes without reformatting, and sports a sector editing tool to modify the data on any sector of the drive -- powerful features that will satisfy even the seasoned Mac experts.

NOTE: The current boot DVD will not boot into Leopard. Apple has not released this to developers yet (DDK), and therefore we cannot provide a bootable Leopard DVD. This affects anyone with a Macintosh released after June of 2007. As a workaround, you can load Drive Genius 2 onto a secondary bootable drive (with Leopard on it) and boot from it. As soon as Apple releases the DDK for a Leopard Boot Disc, a new bootable DVD will be released. Running Drive Genius 2 as an application on your newer Mac is not affected by this (this is only regarding the bootable DVD usage).

Here are some key features of "Drive Genius":

· Duplicate - Fast and easy volume or entire drive cloning.
· Integrity Check - Find problems before they find you with these comprehensive hardware verification tests.
· Repair - Quickly fix corruption on OS X volume structures to get your damaged drive up and running fast.
· Rebuild - Rebuild and replace OS X volume structures to regain access to files that have become lost or hidden.
· Verify - Check OS X volume structures for possible corruption.
· Fix Permissions - Reset OS X boot volume permissions to improve application performance and compatibility.
· SMART Status - Read and display SMART diagnostic codes from your hard drive to avoid dangerous hardware failures.
· Defragment - Get the most speed and efficiency possible by Optimizing your OS X volumes.
· Benchtest - Make sure your hard drive performance is what it should be with comprehensive speed tests and graphical comparisons to other common configurations.
· Surface Scan - Verify your hard drive's reliability with a complete suite of non-destructive read verification tests for any drive or OS X volume.
· Sector Editor - Fine tune all aspects of your system with direct, advanced byte viewing and editing of all data on your drives, volumes and files (for expert users only).
· Partition - Add, delete, hide, expand or shrink OS X partitions so you can organize your data more efficiently.
· Shred - Stop prying eyes with DoD compliant (5220.22 - m) secure erase. Removes all traces of data from free space and deleted files on any device or OS X volume.
· Details - In-depth report of specifications and space utilization of all devices and OS X volumes.
· Initialize - Easy, high level OS X formatting to prepare new hard drives for use on your computer.

Requirements:

· DVD drive
· User interface animations require Quartz Extreme support (G4 or newer)
· 256mb RAM
· 1.0GHz processor minimum

Limitations:

· Features writing to the hard drive are restricted.
· Repair - Can "Verify" the hard drive, "Repair/Rebuild/Repair Permissions" disabled.
· Defrag - Can view the fragmentation on the hard drive. Actual Defrag is disabled.
· Repartition - Can view partition map. Cannot repartition.
· Duplicate - Disabled.
· Sector Edit - Can view sectors. Writing is disabled.
· Shred - Disabled.
· Integrity Check - Disabled. (Has random write)
· Benchtest - Disabled. (Has random write)
· Scan - Can scan the hard drive and report bad blocks.
· Initialize - Disabled.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Bug Fix: Possible (benign) crash during a Defrag on 10.6.x.
· Bug Fix: Possible data loss while moving a volume with Repartition.
· Bug Fix: Possible error when Shredding the free-space of a volume.
· Bug Fix: Repartition issues with 8TB or larger HFS+ volumes.
· Bug Fix: Initialize works once again on 10.6+.
· Bug Fix: Verify Preferences works once again on 10.6+.
· Bug Fix: Repartition could spuriously fail on 10.4.x.