You can install these tools, as well as other utilities, on an old iPod, and connect it to any Mac, booting off the iPod to access the tools. This lets you use an old or current iPod as a disk repair toolkit. TechTool Protogo is designed to run either from the bootable DVD the programs are shipped on, or, more interestingly, from an iPod or other external drive. Build your own custom rescue disk with an old iPod and just a few mouse clicksīack in the days of OS 9, creating a rescue disk that could boot up a Mac with start-up disk problems was easy.TechTool Protogo is a combination of two useful and effective disk tools: TechTool Pro 4, a general hardware and disk maintenance, optimization, and data recovery program, and DiskStudio, a disk tool that can split your disk into several partitions on-the-fly without erasing your data. Now you have to worry about a whole load of invisible folders, folder and file permissions, swap files and more. Then there are Intel Macs with their new hard drive partitioning system, getting utilities to install any necessary kernel extensions on an external drive and more. It’s all just too tricky.įortunately, Micromat has charged to the rescue with TechTool Protogo. This automates the process of creating an emergency rescue disk using anything you might have to hand – a hard drive, an old iPod or even a flash drive – and reduces the whole process to more or less a few mouse clicks. To use it, just plug in your removable media and launch Protogo, once you’ve installed it on a suitable Mac. Protogo will offer you a variety of pre-built configurations for an emergency disk, each with more and more tools. The most basic is a single partition that will start up any Tiger-capable Mac, whether it has a PowerPC or an Intel chip inside it, and has Micromat’s TechTool and DiskStudio utilities on it, as well as OS X’s Console, Disk Utility, Terminal and System Profiler utilities. You won’t have access to the Finder with this configuration and the version of OS X installed will be 10.4.8, from a disk image stored within the Protogo application bundle.īut other configurations offer more, each with increasing disk space requirements. You can add in Finder support set up an OS 9 partition that has Disk First Aid, TechTool Pro 3.1.1 and Drive Setup installed create a partition based on a working OS X installation and add additional applications that you’d like to be included on the drive. You can also create your own custom configurations, involving multiple partitions and applications, that you can save to create identical multiple emergency disks whenever you need them. Once you’ve picked and customised a profile, click the “Build TechTool Protogo Device” button, gulp as Protogo asks if you’d like to reformat the disk, then wait as it copies over the necessary files. You can then connect the drive to a distressed Mac, restart the Mac in target-disk mode and boot up off the drive. Once booted, there’s easy access to the utilities you included via the “Micromat Launcher” that appears on-screen after booting. In practice, the “Universal Profile” works as claimed. Using an old, 5GB first generation iPod, we could start up and repair both an Intel-based iMac and a PowerPC PowerBook after formatting it with the Universal Profile. In fact, the iPod seemed more reliable as an external device than before we’d reformatted it. Being an iPod however, it did give us some obstacles, through the constant launching of iTunes and requests to reformat and sync music with our original Mac’s library. It also stopped functioning as an iPod, flashing up the missing System Folder icon whenever disconnected from a Mac. However, these weren’t big problems and are in no way the fault of Protogo. Protogo pretty much does what it says on the box. Its relatively high price $135 isn’t so steep when you consider that TechTool Pro and DiskStudio are part of the package.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |