Customer Reviews

Micromat TechTool Pro 4 (Mac)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Norton is dead as most you know. It will work on 10.2 or earlier but Norton SystemWorks does not work on any Mac OS after 10.2 very well. Norton had one thing going for it - it did a nice job of repairing B-tree catalog errors and directories - when things started going wonky, if you ran Norton, it would clear things up for a while. The other features might've worked well 5 years earlier but in the end (even though they updated them to run under OSX) were of dubious value - defragmentation, file recovery etc ... especially in the end when you no longer boot from the Norton CD, it was all rather useless and in case you hadn't noticed, the Norton UNINSTALLER only runs under OS9 so if your Mac can't boot OS9 (Classic), you can't remove all those invisible files they leave scattered around.

DRIVE GENIUS looks like the best replacement for Norton. I had a drive go down - it wouldn't mount but since APPLE's DISK ULTITY could "see" the drive, the drive was fine, it was just a matter of restoring the directory. DRIVE GENIUS was the only Mac utility that could recover the directory. My only complaint would be that under REPAIR, there are submenu choices - for some odd reason REPAIR did not repair it but REBUILD did. It would seem that users like us do not really care if you rebuild or repair - as long as you can get the directory fixed so it shows up as an HDD, all is good in the world, right?

In addition, you get other features such as DEFRAGMENT, DUPLICATE, SECTOR EDIT, SHRED, INTEGRITY CHECK, BENCHTEST & SCAN. Of course, Defrag, Duplicate and Shred are pretty obvious as to what they do. Sector Edit is for advanced users - you get to look at the underlying raw hex (?) of the data on the drive so if you feel comfortable doing that. Integrity Check & Scan seems to do the same thing in checking the underlying hardware of your HDD.

DRIVE GENIUS has a pretty nice user interface and you get a constant feedback on when it's doing repairs/rebuilding. That is an EXCELLENT feature. When you are wondering if your data is still intact, you want to know what the utility is doing. And you can boot off the CD - presumably not Intel Macs as it's 10.4

It is not perfect though. For drives that Apple recognizes as drives (you get the query if you want to initialize/eject or ignore) - I was able to get the directory fixed on an IDE USB drive but not an IDE Firewire drive so if you are in the same situation, you might need to plug it in as a USB drive versus in a firewire enclosure. But since it was actually able to see and repair the USB drive, I consider that a victory of sorts plus the the interface is much more re-assuring than the interface of TechTools Pro or DiskWarrior.

TECHTOOLS PRO is now much nicer looking and now feature laden. If you have a couple Macs and quite a few HDD's as I do, you'll most likely want to get it to have it handy to do some things that DRIVE GENIUS does not do. One advanatge is that it can actually test the hardware of your Mac including memory, cache, etc ... unfortunately, it still has the same old "feature" of the old TechTools in that it launches into the test mode as soon as you click on SUITES (what they call hardware tests if choose to do them altogether). For the unintiated, this can scare the crap out of you as when it gets to the video test, your screen changes color in rapid succession (at least it's faster than before) but it's still scary and disconcerting because they do NOT tell you it's about to happen! The other main choices are TESTS, PERFORMANCE, TOOLS & SAFETY. Tests is actually the hardware test that does not scare you. You actually have to press the start button before it races off to check your mac itself. PERFORMANCE lets you optomize the drive or fix directories. TOOLS is actually a nice addition - it is broken down into multiple parts: eDRIVE which lets you create a bootable partition. Aparently you can create this partition even if you haven't physically partitioned your main HDD - frankly, I'm a little too leery of messing with this feature to try it on my main HDD but good luck if you're brave enough. You can also create a duplicate on another HDD. In addition under TOOLS, you get DATA RECOVERY, WIPE DATA, AUDIO & VIDEO testing. The last choice is SAFETY which offers under it: PROTECTION SETUP which is nice as you can back up your directory info; DIAGNOSTICS SETUP which creates an auto schedule for checking up on your Mac & HDD; SMART SETUP for auto notification when your drive is about to have problems and ALERT so it can email you.

To be honest, I had bad experiences in using TechTool's (before it went Pro) in using to fix directories. Like other people, it seemed to have ended trashing most of my files so I can't vouch for its ability to repair anything but the diagnostics and early warning setup are unique to the Mac in one package so if you are really dependent on your Mac to start up & run everyday, it's probably worth getting the diagnostics and eDrive feature - when you actually have a directory problem though, you are probably better off running DRIVE GENIUS first.

One other nice feature of TECHTOOLS PRO is you actually get a printed manual. DRIVE GENIUS is a PDF - unless you print it out, not real useful when you can't access your Mac.

The third main Mac utility in this genre is: DISKWARRIOR. It's main feature is that it has the SMART warning system also to let you know when you might experience a HDD failure. It has some rudimentary repair/rebuild feature but I ran into two main problems. It's hard to tell exactly what it's attempting to do. The progress bar doesn't move very much but the main problem is EXACTLY what you do NOT want out of a utility ... It tells you there is directory problem but it could not fix it. Not what you want when the HDD does not mount. Since it doesn't less than DRIVE GENIUS with only about 30% of its features, you should get DRIVE GENIUS first - for critical users, they might also want to get TECHTOOLS PRO and of course, for those who have mission critical apps they must get to - it doesn't hurt to have DISKWARRIOR around.

In an earlier review I lamented how Techtool had seemed degraded in its performance since its upgrade to vers. 4.0 and Mac OS X compatibility. I have since learned that Symantec, maker of Norton Utilities, has indeed decided to no longer upgrade their general utility program. (According to news reports, they will continue to upgrade their virus and Internet Security software.)

So what does this mean for Mac users? For one, DiskWarrior is a must have. As for Techtool, there's almost no choice - you have to have a general utility that's more powerful than Apple's rather weak First Aid. Here's hoping that Micromat comes up with a good update to Techtool and gets it back to the days of when it was arguably the best utility for the Mac.

If you own a Mac, you're foolish to not invest in 2 fixit apps, TTP and DiskWarrior (DW's unfortunately not yet available for Intel Macs, but should be, soon). TTP does everything you need to do, and does it reliably. It also has an "eDrive" feature, a bootable 2nd volume on your drive containing what you need to fix things (necessary because a volume can't fix itself), which is immediately available when you need it. (DW "only" rebuilds the directory, but that is arguably the most important single thing which sometimes needs fixing. The reason you should have both utilities is that sometimes one of them can fix the directory when the other can't, since they use different approaches. Actually, a Mac owner already owns a fixit utility packaged with the OS, DiskUtility. While the weakest of the three, it, too, is sometimes useful for repair.)

I can't agree with the criticism I've read in the other reviews. If the version of TTP is appropriate to the version of the Mac OS, TTP works as advertised. If the user has inadvertantly used the wrong version, then it's like putting diesel fuel into a gasoline engine. The blame for that mistake can hardly be laid on Micromat's doorstep. I've used TechTool on many different Macs since its beginnings, and it has never caused me a single problem, but it has averted or corrected a number of them.

I've been using Macs and utility programs such as Techtool and Norton for about a decade now.

Through the years I would say that Norton Utilities and Techtool have traded back and forth in the top position as the best utility to own. As a fan of Techtool 3 I would say that Micromat had the better product for several years.

I can't say that now.

Running a B&W upgraded to a 500 MHz G4 with ample RAM I've yet to find Techtool 4.0.4 useful - under either Mac OS 10.2 or 10.3. My first major problem Techtool couldn't fix and I quickly purchased a copy of DiskWarrior which, although slow, fixed the problem. But DiskWarrior only fixes the disk directory. You need a broader utility such as Techtool or Norton for general errors.

Now I've got some new problems with my hard drives (I have three in my machine). Techtool says it found the errors and, if I want them fixed, I have to redo the test with the "repair on" button checked. Well, the button _was_ checked. Infuriating.

Overall, I'd say that Techtool 3 was a far better product. The interface seemed far more friendly and you knew that when you told the program to automatically fix errors that it would do so. Unfortunately, Vers. 3 isn't meant for OS X.

I'm giving Vers. 4 three stars, not because of what it has done, but because I assume it will earn its keep eventually - or perhaps they'll release an update to this version which will address these problems. In any case, you never can have too many disk repair utilities. Still, I think it's time to venture back to Norton to see what they've got cooking. It certainly can't be any less functional and helpful than this.

Completely hosed the 250 GB HD on my new 20" iMac. Drive had to be replaced by Apple.

Takes forever to boot from the CD and the fan operates at an extremely high rate. Tests seem to take forever to run and resulted in a drive that wouldn't mount and couldn't be reformatted, S.M.A.R.T. reported the drive damaged.

It is a shame as I have used the product in the past and found it to effective and reliable.

Currently, I am using Prosoft's Drive Genius which has fewer features, but seems much more reliable.

I wish I had read these reviews before buying Techtool Pro. It seems rather like a defective product. I had a drive that wouldn't mount, and TTP recognized it, and acted like it could recover it, but when I switched from "Drive" mode to "Volume" mode, the drive was no longer visible to the software, so it wouldn't perform any tests.
(In Drive mode, the problem drive passed all the hardware tests multiple times)
I executed the data recovery routine (which took literally all night to run on my 40GB drive, and it found 700+ arbitrary recoverable files from the thousands I had on the drive. It didn't retain the filenames, so it was a crapshoot when recovering any of them (most were superfluous utilities and Word docs, rather than my important files).

If you have a defective drive, put your money toward a new drive, rather than this gamble.

This program has messed up one disk (that was working perfectly) so badly that even DiskWarrior can't repair it. It has fixed no problems on any disk. Get DiskWarrior and hope that a better version (which is compatible with Tiger) comes along soon.

Tech Tool Pro is an excellent disk utility program for Mac users that provides essential tools to keep your hard drives working in optimum condition. It also allows you to maintain and optimize your drives to keep them running smooth. Additionally, it can alert you of drive failures and problems before they strike thus making data loss less likely with advanced warnings. When compared with other Mac disk utility programs on the market, I would say that Tech Tool Pro is definitely preferred over anything produced by Norton. Granted, I have never used Norton on a Mac but I have used it on Windows PC machines and let's just say that my experience with the Windows version was more than enough to steer me clear of trying their Mac version. Tech Tool Pro seems to me to be more stable and reliable than Norton, and I would assume that applies to the Mac version as well.

I first started using this program with OS X Panther and applied the necessary patches released by Micromat when I migrated my system to OS X Tiger. Most of the features worked in Tech Tool Pro but one feature that ceased to work correctly was the "eDrive". This is an emergency bootable partition that Tech Tool will create and boot from to allow you to run repair operations to your start up volume. After applying all of the patches to Tech Tool Pro to make it compatible with Tiger I started having problems with the functionality of the eDrive. I had to spend a lot of time working on this and spent some frustrating moments trying to resolve the problem. For some reason Tech Tool Pro could not properly create the eDrive under Tiger and when I tried to create it it would freeze my system and would not boot up.

I eventually had to resolve the problem by manually creating the eDrive on a firewire hard drive and now all is working normally. Micromat tech support was very helpful and responsive, although they could not resolve the problem to create the eDrive partition from within the program. They did provide me detailed step by step instructions on how to work around this and set up the eDrive manually which is working perfectly now. All in all, this is a good program but it obviously has some issues with Tiger that relates to the eDrive functionality. Hopefully, this type of problem will be eventually resolved but at least there is a simple work around should you encounter the same problem. It appears that not everyone has this problem and my problem may have been related to something getting corrupted in the move from Panther to Tiger; who knows. Despite this one minor glitch, I can heartily recommend this program as one that every Mac user should have at his disposal along with Disk Warrior. I was very impressed with Micromat and their level of support and professionalism. This is a product worth having.

Techtool pro 4 took 2 hours to load. Without asking it defraged my hard drive so it could be all in one block. After that I could not get my iMac Intel Core 2 Duo running OS 10.4.9 to start: "Can't find start up file". I tried all the suggestions from Dr. Mac including single user and the original OSX software, all to no avail. At the shop they ran DiskWarrior which found and replaced the start up file. $80 for TechTool and $45 for repair and I didn't even have a problem in the first place. After that TehcTool worked fine, but I was not impressed.

I used Techtool for years, ats been a good tool... BUT...
Long story short, running TTP4.01 on Tiger (OS10.4) turned my quite healthy disk into an UNUSABLE DISK - black screen. A horro show, with no warning whatsoever. Micromat's current version is Techtool 4.1.1, which may or may not be compatable - I've totally lost faith in them. In any case, its unclear whether if you have this happen to you whether the newer version can repair it. I'm certainly not going to risk it again. HERE'S WHAT WORKED: If you have DiskWarrior: You need v3.03. In any case when you try to use it you'll first get an error dialog that STOPS you from using it further (Micromat would have saved this grief if they had an equivalent check) - Mine said "another disk utility has erased critical directory information". When I saw that I realized they probably knew how to fix what Techtool had wrought. I wasn't disappointed.