[Ti] TiBook/Jaguar diagnostic and repair utilities

[b]

According to John R. Boettiger:

>I know Jaguar includes robust diagnostic and repair utilities better than
>pre-OSX systems. But in anticipation of the arrival of my 17-inch TiBook, I
>find myself wondering about the utility of other programs. Neither Symantec
>(Norton Utilities) nor Micromat (Drive 10 and TechTool Pro) nor Alsoft
>(DiskWarrior) appear to be ready for Jaguar yet, perhaps because they depend
>on booting from their disk. Micromat says they'll have a new Drive 10 in
>about a month, and TechTool 4 by April. Micromat, a year or so ago, was
>doing a better job than Symantec, but I don't know if that's still so. Any
>ideas?
>
>John

I have two partitions, one for some of my OSX stuff, plus the system, 
and the other partition for OS9. I use the newest DiskWarrior [in 
beta, but releasing soon], and Speed Disk, from Norton, in addition 
to the Apple disk utility, which is fine, too.

OSX does a file system check/repair on startup. It's the same as 
running Disk First Aid, or Disk utility. So it's automatic, the only 
thing it doesn't do, automatically, is re-run the utility if it 
repaired anything. In order to do that, which is highly recommended, 
one either boots into 9, if it's on another drive or partition, or 
you can use the Installer disk for either OSX or OS 9 to boot up,and 
then run Disk first Aid from that, OR, you can startup with Option-S 
and when the black screen stops scrolling, type in fsck -y and hit 
return. That runs the disk file system checkup and repair, and if 
anything was repaired [it will say everything appears okay, if 
nothing was repaired], you can run fsck -y again till you get the 
okay.

I keep a copy of Norton Speed Disk on my OS 9 partition, and on an 
external drive, so I can set the RAM allocation on t real high, and 
boot with my OS 9 Installer and run Speed Disk from there. I never 
install Disk Doctor or any other Norton Utility on a Mac.

DiskWarrior already handed out copies of DW 3, which is a terrific 
app, but the final  release is coming in the next 3 or 4 weeks. I 
have had nothing but trouble when it comes to using DW, or Micromat's 
OSX boot disks, they just don't have that figured out quite right, 
yet.

I managed to create an OS 9.1 boot disk that has Norton, Micromat, 
DiskWarrior, and about a hundred other utilities on it, and it boots 
fine, but even using CDBoot, I'm having a hard time getting good 
results with a custom OSX boot CD.

One of the issues [and my reason for installing Speed Disk on the 
actual drives] is that when these companies ship boot CDs with their 
utilities on them, they have to set their utilities to use minimal 
RAM [because they don't know how much RAM all the various users have 
available]. This can make  de-fragging a drive with millions of 
allocation blocks, and 100,000+ files, a lengthy procedure. And, 
since one cannot reset the memory allocation on a program that 
resides on a locked CD, there's a catch-22 involved, hence the need 
for a good custom boot CD.

The work continues...

~flipper