Support
DriveChk is made by one person. Write to me and you will get a reply from me, not a ticketing system.
What to include
Drive problems are hardware problems, and hardware is specific. The more of this you can tell me, the more useful the answer:
- The Mac — model and macOS version
- The drive — internal or external, and the enclosure if there is one
- What DriveChk shows, and what you expected instead
Activating after you buy
Your licence key is shown on the confirmation page immediately after payment, and emailed to you as well. In DriveChk, open Settings, go to the Licence tab, paste the key and click Activate — that ties the licence to this Mac and ends the trial countdown. If you ever lose the key it is always in the customer portal: sign in with the email you bought with.
Common answers
A USB drive shows no health data. Most USB enclosures cannot pass SMART through without a driver, and most USB flash drives do not support it at all. The external drive page explains which case you are in.
DriveChk is not re-checking in the background. It only runs checks while it is running. If it is not set to start at login, nothing is re-checked after a restart — the app says so in its window and offers to turn it on.
A surface scan will not start. Reading raw sectors needs administrator access and Full Disk Access, which macOS requires even of processes already running as root. DriveChk shows the exact permission it is missing and a button to the right Settings pane.
My licence will not activate on a new Mac. A licence covers one Mac at a time. If you still have the old Mac, open DriveChk there and choose Release This Mac in Settings. If that Mac is gone, release its activation in the customer portal — see below.
Refunds
There is a free 3-day trial precisely so you can find out whether DriveChk can read your drives before paying. If you buy it and it turns out it cannot do what you needed, email me and I will refund you.
Moving your licence to another Mac
A licence covers one Mac at a time, and it is yours to move. If you still have the old Mac, open DriveChk there and choose Release This Mac in Settings. If that Mac is broken, wiped or sold, use the customer portal instead: sign in with the email you bought with, find the activation — it is labelled with the computer name and model, so you can tell your Macs apart — and deactivate it. Then activate on the new Mac. There is no limit on how many times a licence can move, and you never need to ask me to reset anything.
A limit worth being clear about
DriveChk reports what your drives say about themselves and what its own checks find. That catches a great deal, early. It does not catch everything — drives sometimes fail suddenly and without warning, and no health check changes that. It is a reason to keep backups, not a replacement for them.