So you’re a Mac tech and you regularly encounter hundreds, if not thousands, of Macs. And while these Macs share an operating system, they are often more different than they are alike. Users install the strangest stuff and do mind-bogglingly weird things to their systems, often while attempting to solve a problem themselves. Your job is to fix these neglected, abused, and mucked-up Macs. So, which tools do you use, and what tips or tricks are there to help you overcome the unforeseen problems that are lurking behind the innocent login window? Here’s my setup. You are welcome to copy or modify to fit your particular Mac troubleshooting environment:

THE HARDWARE
First, you’ll need to get an external, bus-powered hard drive. I really like these cases from OWC, but have used the WD Passports (see my note at the end of this article) and the SmartDisks also with good success. Know that PPC Macs can only boot from Firewire and Intel Macs can boot from either Firewire or from USB 2.0 (some Intel Macs like the latest MacBooks and the MacBook Air do not have Firewire). I like the OWC cases because most of them have both Firewire 800 and USB 2.0, allowing me to boot virtually any Mac from my Utilities HD. My bag also contains a plethora of cables: Firewire 800 to 400, 6-pin to 4-pin, and so forth.

PARTITIONING
For many years PPC Macs used a partition mapping called Apple Partition Map (APM). An APM-formatted drive can boot both PPC and Intel Macs. The newer Intel Macs have a default partition mapping as GUID. A GUID-formatted HD can boot only Intel Macs. For this reason, I recommend you format your Utilities drive as APM and not GUID, so to be compatible with the largest number of Macs possible. To switch formats, you simply need to select the “Options” button at the bottom of your partitioning window in Disk Utility to be presented with the following.

I generally partition my Utilities HD into three partitions:

1. a 9GB partition for a dupe of the Leopard Retail installer (now at 10.5.6).
2. a 20GB partition for a Leopard install with all my software tools installed.
3. the remainder of the HD as a data store for .dmg’s of my software installers.

You can adjust these partitions to your liking. You may choose to have a larger “Tools” partition if you know you’ll be installing the Developer Tools or other space-intensive tools. I’ve found that 20GB, for me, is sufficient.

MAKING THE LEOPARD INSTALLER DUPE
This is very easy to do. You’ll want to make sure that you’re using a retail copy of Leopard. If you attempt to use a DVD that came with a Mac, you’ll find that it won’t boot any Macs other than the model it came from. Sometimes, models are close enough that you can switch installers around between them, but more often than not, the Installer DVDs that came with a Mac are tied to only that model. The most recent retail version of Leopard is 10.5.6 and it should boot just about any Mac out there, including the newest MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Once you have your retail Leopard disk, use Disk Utility to make a .dmg of the installer, as if you were going to dupe it to another DVD. But instead of burning back to DVD, simply use the “Restore” option in Disk Utility to restore your just-created Retail Leopard DVD .dmg to your “Leopard Installer” partition. When done, you’ll have a partition on your Utilities HD that can boot virtually any Mac and install the retail copy of Leopard many times faster than installing from DVD media. An additional bonus is that a HD partition can never get scratched in your bag.

REGARDING A TIGER INSTALLER PARTITION
If, for some reason, you need to make a Tiger installer, you’ll need to know that the only universal (Both PPC and Intel) versions of 10.4.x are the ones for Mac OS X Server, namely Mac OS X Server 10.4.7. Because of this, you’ll need to make separate boot HDs for your PPC and Intel Macs. There are some hacks out there to make a universal 10.4.11 bootable drive but since Leopard is already universal, it’s just simpler to use the new OS. Creating a universal 10.4.x installer or boot HD is outside of the scope of this document; but it can be done. I remember finding instructions for doing so in the Bombich forums.

THE SOFTWARE TOOLS I USE:
There are many software tools on the market. Some are excellent, some are not. Below is a list of the best tools that I’ve found for maintaining, managing, and fixing Macs:

• Alsoft’s DiskWarrior – the king of Mac disk utilities. It really just does one important task, but it does it better than any other tool on the market. DiskWarrior repairs and rebuilds a volume’s disk directory. Think of a disk directory as a giant, cross-referenced table of contents for the data on your drive. If that index becomes damaged or corrupted, the OS can have a hard time even operating. Files can become lost, overwritten, or damaged due to a damaged disk directory, resulting in a non-bootable system or data loss. DiskWarrior fixes this for you by scanning your volume and building a new directory to replace the old, possibly damaged one. DiskWarrior also lets you “preview” a read-only copy of your HD. On many occasions, I’ve used this feature to pull data from a very damaged hard drive, as it allows me to mount the volume that would otherwise be unmountable and unreadable by other utilities.
• Disk Utility. Apple’s built-in utility, great for executing fsck or repairing permissions, or partitioning / formatting a drive.
• ProSoft’s Drive Genius 2. A bit flashy for my tastes, but it does what it does fairly well. Drive Genius can do a lot, including initializing and partitioning drives, but I mostly use it for it’s optimization (or defragmentation) feature. While it’s true that there is disk defragmentation built into Mac OS X (10.3 and higher), there are a few occasions where I’ve found defragging a drive to be useful. For instance, I spent a great deal of time building a customized PPC 10.4.11 image for some ancient eMacs and iMacs and needed the system to be as lean and fast as possible, and so after stripping out all the language files, unnecessary fonts, and Intel code (using Xslimmer), I defragged the master eMac’s HD before making an ASR image. This helped with the speed and responsivemess on these older Macs quite a bit.
• ProSoft’s Data Rescue II – another fairly essential tool. I use this for recovering accidentially deleted files, or for scavenging files from a failing HD.
• Stellar Phoenixs Data Recovery – a newcomer in the Mac market, their Data Recovery product has found a place on my Utilities HD after recovering data that Data Rescue could not. Otherwise, it’s a very similar product.
• Micromat TechTool Pro – this tool has been around forever (anyone remember it’s predecessor, MacEKG? Eventually I’ll get around to installing that ancient software on an ancient Mac and get the sounds and record the functionality for the nostalgia of all of us ancient Mac techs.). I keep this one installed mostly because I find it’s hardware diagnostics useful.
• Apple Developer Tools – Far too many to list, but I find most useful File Merge and Property List Editor.
• Carbon Copy Cloner – the original and still the best disk cloning app around. Still free.
• NetRestore & NetRestoreHelper – now discontinued, but I keep them around, particuarly because of the latter’s ease in generating ASR images.
• Coriolis System iDefrag & iPartition. I once used the latter to dynamically expand a cloned AppleTV system, that was cloned to a larger HD for greater capacity.
• memtest – use this to test RAM. Does a great job of detecting “bad” RAM.
• SubRosaSoft’s OfficeSalvage & FileSalvage – haven’t really used yet, as the other data recovery softwares have always proven successful (or completely unsuccessful because of a hardware failure of the drive).

This list is not complete. There are many other freeware and shareware tools I’ve installed, such as: Eavesdrop, KisMac, iStumbler, X-Ray, Super Get Info, TextWrangler, Batchmod, and Apache Studio.

INSTALLERS
The third and final partition of my Utilities drive is reserved as a data store for Installers and updaters. The Mac OS X 10.5.6 combo installer weighs in at around 600MB and a Final Cut Pro Studio 2.0 set of DVD images is about 50GB. Installing from a HD, instead of from optical media, is many times faster and you don’t have to worry about scratched media or losing serial numbers. When I was consulting regularly, I’d convinced many of my larger clients to allow me to build an Emergency HD in this manner that had on it CD and DVD backups of all of their installers with their serial numbers in txt files. This allowed them an excellent tool for rolling out a new workstation and also helped in cases of disaster recovery–for instance, when one client had to relocate from offices near the WTC to mid-town, in the weeks following 9/11.

I love that I’m able to build such a verstatile and powerful set of tools all self-contained inside a 2.5″ bus-powered HD. Ten years ago, I was building bootable CDs in a similar manner, with Mac OS 8 or Mac OS 9 and a suite of tools and I’d have to restamp a new CD every month or so. Now, I simply update my drive(s), as necessary.

I hope that you’ve found this article useful and welcome any feedback. Perhaps you have a favorite utility that I’ve not included. Happy troubleshooting!

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve recently discovered that the WD My Passport Studio edition hard drives, which have both a FW800 and USB port, will not boot from the Firewire side of the drive, which makes it farily useless as a boot drive for PPC Macs. Don’t buy this model HD if you want to boot PPC Macs with it. Stick with the OWC cases or the Lacie Rugged Disks. If you know you’ll only be booting Intel Macs (which can boot from USB), then the WD My Passport Studio drive will work for you.

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