boot disc to perform a scan/test of hard drive?

[ZippyDan]

i normally use Hitachi's DFT (Drive Fitness Test) boot cd to test my hard drives for imminent failure. so far, it has been extremely reliable. now i want to perform the same test on an iMac, but even though i was able to get it to partially boot from the DFT disc, it didnt seem to work right and i cant actually load DFT on the mac (i know the disc is fine because i loaded dft to two other PCs seconds before.) what is a good boot disc HDD scan/tester that will reliably (full sector scan) tell me if a hard drive is currently good or not?

 

[TheStu]

You should be able to run the hardware diagnostics off the OS X disc that came with the machine. Put the disk in and hold D after rebooting.

TechTools Pro will check SMART status on the drives, and I think that Disk Utility does too, but neither of them is a boot disk.

 

[BriGy86]

Originally posted by: TheStu
You should be able to run the hardware diagnostics off the OS X disc that came with the machine. Put the disk in and hold D after rebooting.

TechTools Pro will check SMART status on the drives, and I think that Disk Utility does too, but neither of them is a boot disk.

TechTool Pro 5 is a boot disk.

HDD specific tools:
-File Structures (checks for proper file structure)
-Volume Structures (tests integrity of the volume)
-Surface Scan (Scans for bad blocks)
-SMART Check
-File Optimization (defrag)
-Volume Optimization (compacts files)
-Disk Permissions
-Wipe Data
-Data Recovery
-Volume Rebuild

 

[TheStu]

Oh hey, I had no idea that it was a boot disk... thanks for the info Gy

 

[BriGy86]

Check out a tool called Onyx too
http://www.apple.com/downloads...sk_utilities/onyx.html

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

If you have a PC you can pull the drive from the mac and put it into a pc and run spinrite to do an actual drive test.

 

[ZippyDan]

well its a pain pulling anything out of an imac...

i like DFT because it basically gives me a big green GOOD box or a big red BAD box. if i set tests to run over night, even my users can tell me if the test was a success or failure. i hope the OS X tests are similarly user friendly as far as results and don't require interpretation?

 

[TheStu]

On TechTools plus you get generally simple pass or fail notifications. It runs full SMART test as part of the drive suite and each sub test has an indicator bar that is green for good, red for bad, and some other color (yellow?) in the middle for 'look out this could go bad'

 

[BriGy86]

I should also share I just ran into a problem with an early 2009 Mac Pro. It was manufactured around April and will not boot from and OS X disk that is earlier than 10.5.6. Looks like it wont boot from the TechTool pro CD either, possibly because of how new it is.