Brief Hands-On Report--Using TechTool Pro 4.5.1 Beta 2 (Universal)

On Friday, we noted that Micromat had released the second public beta of TechTool Pro v4.5.1b2 (Universal). The license splash screen said 24 days until expiration so it will work until the end of July.

Subsequently, we fired up TTP 4.5.1 beta and ran the Intermediate Suite of tests on both our iMac Core Duo's 250GB internal hard drive and our MiniMate 80GB external FireWire hard drive. All went well. We also ran Directory Maintenance and Volume Optimization on both drives. The internal drive had 2090 fragments and the external drive had 2409 frags. All were resolved. The entire process took about two hours and no problems were encountered.

One of the fixes in beta 2 is "Fixed issue with eDrive creation/deletion on Intel Macs." We examined this more closely. One cannot create an eDrive on the same drive on which one is booted. If attempted, the message appears "Restart from the TechTool 4 CD/DVD to modify the selected volume and create the eDrive." Of course there is no official CD/DVD available with this beta on it.

If one mounts an external drive on the desktop in addition to the boot drive, one can then create an eDrive on it and vice versa. That seems a bit illogical to us since one purpose of the eDrive is to eliminate the need for an external drive in the first place. [Dana Baggett]