Apple Diagnostic Tests

Y

ylon

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What are the best hardware diagnostic tests out there for Mac OS X? I've seen very limited success with the Tech Tools Pro and such, and I'm wondering if there is something more "high powered" that will run the gamut on machines such as a Power Mac G5 dual proc system. Also, I'm quite curious, what do the Apple Stores use as I have been told by employees that they use their own in house testing software. What is this titled? I see a number of interesting names on the Apple trademark list at Apple.com, but I'm not sure if one of those is that package or not.

Thanks much for any help and or information!
 
I don't know how intense of a diagnostic (and how much reporting you want), but a pretty low level testing suite is available on the OSX DVD that comes with most recent macs. Insert the DVD and hold down the Option key to get to the Apple Hardare Test. This suite diagnosed bad RAM for me when System Profiler didn't give any hint as to what was wrong.
 
You can't get Apple's test suite unless you're an Apple Dealer.

TechTool Pro has the most tests available.
 
It's quite frustrating as I've been running into some panics in Tiger and have been told that I need to contact Apple Care, however neither them nor the Apple Store will give me a better verdict than that they can look at my system but it will be 4-6 days before they get it back to me and this is unacceptable right now. So I was hoping to figure out if there were a better diagnostic suite than that which I already know of (such as TechTool & DW) to see if I can ascertain if it truly is a hardware issue before giving up my system for that period of time. memtest came back saying that the first 2G of RAM are alright so ... blah, I'm really stuck between a rock and a hard place. I wish Apple would give us better diagnostic tools, especially developers.
 
Tiger hasn't been released to the public yet, so tools won't be available yet. When it's released, there should be tools available.
 
It's highly unlikely that Apple would take the time to write a suite of performance/testing/diagnostic tools for a piece of software that is unfinished and changing on a daily basis. Once the code base stabilizes, I'm sure we'll see a flood of new troubleshooting utilities specifically for the new OS.

It may help to know exactly what kind of diagnostic/performance/troubleshooting tools you're looking for that aren't included in the current crop of tools. TechTool takes care of disk health as does DiskWarrior, and Disk Utility takes care of disk health and permissions problems. Data Rescue takes care of retrieving deleted data. The included Hardware Test CD that comes with all new Macs should test the bare essentials of the hardware, including some not-so-bare-essentials as well. The Developer Tools, available to all registered developers, has many, many software benchmarking, troubleshooting and performance-enhancing tools. MacBench, although showing its age now, is a decent benchmarking utility. I don't think we need to bring up defragmenting/optimization, since I think the general consensus is that the OS takes care of that itself, and defragging/optimizing a disk only sets the OS back in its quest to arrange the disk to its liking.

At any rate, beyond these, what kind of hardware tests are you looking for that aren't covered under one of those other titles?
 
ElDiabloConCaca: Of course they wouldn't. What I'm saying is that they should make available the software that certified repair shops use so that more thorough beta testing can be performed, thus raising the level of QA for bug reports and tracking. I have found in my line of work that it is always a good idea to start first with hardware if there are certain things happening within a given parameter.

No, essentially everything tests out (the provided hardware test cd, techtool, etc.). The only hiccup I've found is that the filesystem is saying that there is a problem. fsck is fine with it, but other diag tools are not. So its hard to say if it is an issue with hfs or if it is some hidden hardware issue that cannot be detected without deeper diagnostic tools. ¿Comprende? The Apple Stores say that they have software that is above and beyond that which anyone else has, which is what I'm talking about. If that is true, that software ought to be included to developers under the NDA or such. Another thing, you cannot use software tools provided to developers on kernel panics. The only real option one has (and it has not appeared that the kernel is even in a state to do perform this as I've only seen it once offer remote debugging connectivity) is to install Tiger on another box and use the debug kernel to perform some tracebacks there via gdb. I just wish I had another box to try that on at the moment and that I'd be sure a remote connection could be made.
 
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