About the TechTool Pro Boot DVD

When using a diagnostic utility, it is sometimes necessary to boot your Mac from another volume in order to diagnose and repair problems on your normal startup volume. Historically, many disk utilities have provided a DVD for this purpose, including TechTool Pro. Since version 4, TechTool Pro has also included the eDrive tool in order to run TechTool Pro and other utilities from another bootable volume. With the advent of Macs without DVD drives, the functionality of the eDrive is becoming increasingly important. If you haven't already, we encourage all TechTool Pro users to create an eDrive in lieu of relying upon the DVD for their troubleshooting needs.

For those who still require the DVD, here is some additional information:

Our current bootable DVD (Version 6.0.3) supports Macintosh computers capable of running Mac OS X 10.6 or greater, except for:

MacBook Air (July 2011)

Mac mini (July 2011)

* The eDrive feature of TechTool Pro will boot all Macs that support Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

The system version on our current bootable DVD is:

Mac OS X 10.6.7

Mac OS X 10.5.8 - included as a .dmg file on the DVD. Macs that will boot under 10.5.8, but not 10.6 may burn their own DVD.

It is not necessary to boot from a CD or DVD to perform functions that require unmounting the normal startup drive. In fact, under Mac OS X, this is recommended only as a last resort. It is always better to boot and run utility software from a hard drive under Mac OS X. This is because Mac OS X is based on Unix and it works best if it has hard drive swap space for memory management. This provides faster performance and greater stability. Booting from a CD or DVD there is no memory swap space. If Mac OS X runs low on memory, the computer may slow down or even freeze. This is one of the reasons we have included the eDrive option in our Mac OS X product TechTool Pro. The eDrive is a small startup partition containing TechTool Pro which the program creates on one of the computer's hard drives. The eDrive's system is based on the installed operating system on the normal startup hard drive. Consequently it is capable of booting the computer and incurs no speed penalty.

Instead of booting from a CD or DVD, you can set up a second bootable hard drive by installing Mac OS X onto the second drive, booting from it, and then installing the Micromat software onto it. In addition, if you have access to a second Macintosh, you can start up the first Macintosh in FireWire target disk mode and connect it to the second one using a FireWire cable. You can then run the software from the second Macintosh to work on the original one's hard drive. The above procedures allow you to run the software in order to work on the startup hard drive of a Mac which cannot boot from the available CD or DVD. Also, software installed on a hard drive (unlike a CD or DVD) can be updated as free updaters are posted on our website. This allows you to run the latest version of the software regardless of the version of the CD or DVD.