How do I run Disk Warrior on new MacBook Pros?

Question

I am trying to help my good friend who purchased a Late-2012 Macbook Pro 13-inch Core i5 2.5 GHz. It runs 10.8 ML. WIth reckless technical abandon, she swamped and corrupted her HD directory with repeated massive transfers of large-size photo files in and out of her laptop when the drive was already probably at least 95% full to capacity. She probably experienced repeated Out-of-Memory notifications as she would try to perform these ops while Photoshop was using almost all available free space on the same disk as Scratch Storage for its operations.
Suddenly she could not boot her MBP. She called Apple warranty support, and they convinced her the only thing she could do was to wipe the HD and reinstall the OS. Angry as **** about losing about 3 weeks of critical photo images since her last backup, she dutifully obeyed. She said the wipe operation took only a part of a minute.
So, with that background, I told her I felt the wipe was not a low-level erase at all, but just the most minimal erase procedure possible, and that I thought many of her old files may be recoverable with a tool like DiskWarrior if she did it immediately, before starting to reinstall applications and other content back onto the disk.Can anyone back me up on this?
Now, on to how I can try to do the recovery. She has considered sending the drive out to a "clean room" recovery service, but before doing so at great cost, I wanted to at least try a DiskWarrior directory repair. With no optical drive, she cannot boot from the Disk Warrior 7.X DVD, or create a bootable CD or DVD to run Disc Warrior for the same reason. How else can we force the MBP to allow the hard drive to be read by DiskWarrior? Can I load DW on a FireWire drive and use Thunderbolt-to-FW adapter on MBP to boot from it? Disk Warrior's website still says "The current DiskWarrior DVD cannot start up the new MacBook Pros introduced June 11, 2012. An updated disc that will also start up these recent Mac models will be released as soon as Apple, Inc. releases new startup files to Alsoft, Inc. and other developers." Do I still have to wait for something from Apple? Or can I put the MBP in Target Mode and run DW connected via FireWire (and Thunderbolt adapter) from my own MacBook running OSX Lion?  And hopefully repair her directory? Is there hope here?

Answer 1

You'll need to install Windows on your Macbook. This can be done by either using Boot Camp (free, from Apple) or Parallels Desktop for Mac (free trial, $80 retail). Either approach requires that you own an additional copy of Windows (Windows XP sp2 for Boot Camp) which you will then install on your Mac.
In brief, Boot Camp sets up your Mac so you can boot into either OS X or Windows (but not have both running at the same time; you switch via a reboot), and Parallels creates a virtual machine in which you will run Windows while OS X is running. You're correct that you can't run Virtual PC on your Intel-based Mac. Parallels will give you that functionality on your Mac (and be a lot faster than Virtual PC in the process).
You might want to start with Parallels' free trial and see if that meets your needs for these CDs. Parallels doesn't require that you make changes to your partitions on your drive; it just installs an application and creates a virtual disk which to OS X is just another file (albeit a large one), and you don't need to reboot to switch back and forth between Windows and OS X. If it works, you're set.
If you have graphics adapter-intensive Windows applications (e.g., games or something that requires 3D acceleration), you'll be better off with Boot Camp, because the current version of Parallels does not support DirectX or 3D hardware acceleration.
Hopefully that will get you started. There's other info in the Discussions comparing Parallels to Boot Camp, but feel free to ask if you have questions.
Intel Mini 1.66 GHz, Mac Pro 2.66 GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  
Vista and XP running under Parallels