Currently Supported Systems

Our current bootable products support all PowerPC and Intel Macintosh computers capable of running Mac OS X 10.5 or greater (including Snow Leopard), except for:

• iMac Intel Core i5 & i7 (October 2009)

The system version on our bootable products is:

• Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Universal)

TechTool Pro does not currently support hard drives larger than 2TB.

About Bootable Systems

To perform certain operations on a Mac's default startup drive, such as testing/repairing the disk directories, disk optimization, or repartitioning the drive, it is necessary to boot the computer and run the software from an alternate operating system. This is because these functions cannot be performed on an active drive. It must be unmounted first. This is a restriction posed upon utilities like ours from the operating system. Back in the days of Mac OS 8 and prior, it was possible to perform many of these functions on a live and active drive. With the release of Mac OS 9, this was no longer allowed and this restriction has continued through Mac OS X.

In order to provide an alternate startup location from which to run a program, Micromat includes bootable Macintosh operating systems with several of its products. For example, TechTool Pro and DiskStudio ship on bootable DVDs. TechTool Protege includes a bootable system on the Protege flash drive. You can start the computer from this alternate system in order to perform functions on the normal startup hard drive that could not be done while it is the active system drive. The systems we provide are licensed from Apple. They are specially-designed, minimal systems that are optimized to run from non-write media like a CD or DVD. They do not contain all the features found in a full Mac OS installation, such as a Finder, Apple menu options, etc. Consequently, as Apple releases new Macintosh models, new system components are usually required to boot them. In that case, devices or media using earlier systems will not be able to boot the newer models. Micromat must wait until Apple releases new system versions (boot DDKs) in order to incorporate these official minimal systems in their products to be able to boot these newer Macs. This wait is often several months.

Micromat programmers can work with full shipping versions of the operating system for newer machines to attempt to create a small system which will fit and run on a CD or DVD. If successful, we can use this system on products until Apple releases the official version to developers. The disadvantage of this approach is that such a system is considerably slower to boot. Hence, we only do this if necessary as an interim solution.

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.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 01 April 2010 )