Thursday, February 18, 2010

Overview

TechTool Pro 5 is arguably one of the coolest diagnostic and repair utilities out there.  It allows you to determine the health of your Macintosh with relative ease in a very “Mac Like”  interface.

This is the latest version of this powerful diagnostic and repair tool.  It is one tool that you have to use to really appreciate.

As with previous versions, TechTool is designed to diagnose problems and to repair most of them as well.  There are some items that it can repair when it is running on your hard drive, but there are other problems that you must boot from the TechTool DVD or an eDrive partition (more on this later).

You can run an entire gauntlet of tests by clicking on the Check Computer button.  But be prepared.  If you select this option, the programs tests everything - so you might want to start this before you go to bed, instead of doing it on a busy day.

Other tests you can perform include:

1. ✓ Memory Test - verify RAM integrity
   

2. ✓ Surface Scan - scan for physical hard drive problems
   

3. ✓ SMART Test - check SMART for potential drive failure
   

4. ✓ Volume Structures - test for directory problems
   

5. ✓ Video Memory - check out the VRAM on your computer
   

6. ✓ File Structures - check file integrity and structure
   

The repair functions that are available are:

1. ✓ Volume Rebuild - optimization and repair directories
   

2. ✓ File Optimization - consolidation of file fragments
   

3. ✓ Volume Optimization - consolidate free HD space
   

4. ✓ Data Recovery - recover data from corrupted drives
   

5. ✓ Wipe Data - secure deleted files with multiple overwrites   
   

6. ✓ Volume Journaling - turn on or off journaling on your HD
   

7. ✓ Disk Permissions - set permissions on your drive
   

8. ✓ Video - check iSight camera and calibrate monitors
   

9. ✓ Audio - check out the Audio signal on your Mac
   

Testing Your Mac

As stated earlier, there are a lot of tests available in TechTool Pro 5.  Rather than run every single test, which is what happens if you use the Check Computer option, you should use the tests that you know you need. 

In my case, I have a fairly new computer (less than 1 year old), so I am not going to run the Surface Scan or Smart Test. These are better suited to older hard drives or ones that have been showing very noisy or erratic behavior, such as problems in reading and writing of data.

The Memory test is one that you should run when you have done a  memory upgrade or you are having occasional computer crashes for no apparent reason.

You can’t run the Volume Structures test unless you boot the computer from another drive, the TechTool DVD, or an eDrive partition on your computer.

I have been having some problems with some older .xml files on the computer, so I will test these and the plist files.  The plist (property list) files are critical to system operation as they control settings for particular programs, etc.  For this reason, I have decided to test these files.

To perform the test, I click on the File Structures button on the bottom left of the window, then I click on the drive I want to check in the bottom middle of the window. The I make sure that the only checkbox on the bottom right that is selected is the one for xml and plist files. Then I clicked on the run file structures button. 

With TechTool, you always select the:

1. ‣type of test
   

2. ‣place you want to test
   

3. ‣specific types of files you want to test
   

...then click on a button to actually start the test.

I know it sounds like a pain, but this way you are CERTAIN about what you just selected to do.

After I ran the tests, I found that I had quite a few errors in my .xml files.  The program lists all the corrupted files in a list, along with WHERE they are...making it very easy to fix or replace the damaged file.

See the video below for a playback of my test results.

Rebuilding the directory on your Mac with TechTool

To rebuild the directory, or to do any major repairs on your computer with TechTool, you must either boot up with the DVD or boot up using an eDrive partition on your computer.  In order to create the eDrive, you MUST boot up using the DVD. 

If your drive is badly fragmented, it wouldn’t hurt to boot off the DVD and run the Optimizer option to defragment the drive before you create the eDrive.  Defragment files, then the entire volume.

When I installed the eDrive on my iMac, it took around 13 Gigabytes of hard drive space, so you may need at least that much free space to install it. 

Some people have said they had problems installing the eDrive, and it took multiple tries to install it. 

In my case, I had problems with the install as well. My solution to the problem was to reboot off of the main partition, delete the files in the eDrive, then restart from the DVD and delete the eDrive with TechTool and re-create it. The second install went smooth as silk.

After the eDrive is created, you will need to mount it so it is available to the system.  If it doesn’t show on the desktop, it can’t be used as a boot device. 

To boot off the eDrive, you need to either go into System Preferences, select Startup Disk, then select your eDrive and click on Restart, or from within TechTool, select the Tools button, select the eDrive option, then click on Restart eDrive.

The video below shows the steps for Rebuilding a directory.

I hope this review helped you with TechTool.