![]() If you have an array of Macs that you need to support and are fed up of having numerous CDs and manually creating your own emergency disks, get Protogo.Mac OS X 10.7 (“Lion”) will be happy to know that Micromat has “lion-ized” TechTool Protogo () as of version 3.0. However, with DiskWarrior, Data Rescue II and other utility apps shipping as standalone applications, this is no great problem in itself, and both TechTool and DiskStudio are fine apps in their own rights that most people can get by with. Some support for slipstreaming applications that use standard OS X installers into the emergency disk would be helpful. There’s also the assumption that any extra tool you need will exist purely as an application and not need other files. The first is that those unhappy Macs that can’t run Tiger are left out in the cold by Protogo, although OS 9 booting can help a little, unless you can fashion a working pre-10.4 installation on another drive. The program has perhaps a couple of flaws. ![]() If you’re worried that the Protogo disk image will become outdated as you buy new Macs, you can subscribe to an annual update scheme as well, but this should be unnecessary for the average user. Its relatively high price $135 isn’t so steep when you consider that TechTool Pro and DiskStudio are part of the package. Protogo pretty much does what it says on the box. However, these weren’t big problems and are in no way the fault of Protogo. It also stopped functioning as an iPod, flashing up the missing System Folder icon whenever disconnected from a Mac. Being an iPod however, it did give us some obstacles, through the constant launching of iTunes and requests to reformat and sync music with our original Mac’s library. In fact, the iPod seemed more reliable as an external device than before we’d reformatted it. Using an old, 5GB first generation iPod, we could start up and repair both an Intel-based iMac and a PowerPC PowerBook after formatting it with the Universal Profile. In practice, the “Universal Profile” works as claimed. Once booted, there’s easy access to the utilities you included via the “Micromat Launcher” that appears on-screen after booting. You can then connect the drive to a distressed Mac, restart the Mac in target-disk mode and boot up off the drive. ![]() Once you’ve picked and customised a profile, click the “Build TechTool Protogo Device” button, gulp as Protogo asks if you’d like to reformat the disk, then wait as it copies over the necessary files. You can also create your own custom configurations, involving multiple partitions and applications, that you can save to create identical multiple emergency disks whenever you need them. You can add in Finder support set up an OS 9 partition that has Disk First Aid, TechTool Pro 3.1.1 and Drive Setup installed create a partition based on a working OS X installation and add additional applications that you’d like to be included on the drive. You won’t have access to the Finder with this configuration and the version of OS X installed will be 10.4.8, from a disk image stored within the Protogo application bundle.īut other configurations offer more, each with increasing disk space requirements. The most basic is a single partition that will start up any Tiger-capable Mac, whether it has a PowerPC or an Intel chip inside it, and has Micromat’s TechTool and DiskStudio utilities on it, as well as OS X’s Console, Disk Utility, Terminal and System Profiler utilities. Protogo will offer you a variety of pre-built configurations for an emergency disk, each with more and more tools. To use it, just plug in your removable media and launch Protogo, once you’ve installed it on a suitable Mac. This automates the process of creating an emergency rescue disk using anything you might have to hand – a hard drive, an old iPod or even a flash drive – and reduces the whole process to more or less a few mouse clicks. It’s all just too tricky.įortunately, Micromat has charged to the rescue with TechTool Protogo. Then there are Intel Macs with their new hard drive partitioning system, getting utilities to install any necessary kernel extensions on an external drive and more. Now you have to worry about a whole load of invisible folders, folder and file permissions, swap files and more. Build your own custom rescue disk with an old iPod and just a few mouse clicksīack in the days of OS 9, creating a rescue disk that could boot up a Mac with start-up disk problems was easy.
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