Techtool Pro 7 and All Other Micromat Products for $25 USD (Save $75)

21

Go to Deal

timmypete on 21/07/2014 - 21:46 micromat.com (99 clicks)
Last edited 23/07/2014 - 12:20 by 1 other user

Techtool Pro is one of the oldest system diagnosis and repair tools for Mac OS X and IMHO the most useful. I've usually purchased this when it comes out in the $50 Mac bundle deals as this is usually the cheapest legitimate way to come by a licence, but at the moment they are running a sale for all of their software.

Since Micromat first opened its doors in 1989, we've been creating repair and diagnostic tools for Macintosh users, consultants and technicians. In fact, we were the first company to offer these types of tools to the public. 25 years later, we're still creating the tools that have helped millions of Mac users get their computers back in order and running at their very best.

To celebrate those 25 years of business, we're making a very special offer: For a limited time, we'll be offering any of our products for the unheard-of-price of only $25 each. But hurry up before this offer expires. We won't be doing anything like this again until our 50th anniversary. And by then we'll probably be charging twice the price.

Titles include
* TechTool Pro 7 (Full Version) was $99 USD, now $25 (DVD copy still $12.99).
* Checkmate was $49.99 USD, now $25.
* TechTool Protogo 4 (Full Version) was $149.99 USD, now $25.

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micromat.com

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  Look43Bs on 21/07/2014 - 22:21

  These Mac products have been around for many years. I have used them and found them to be very reliable. Well worth the price.

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  greenie4242 on 21/07/2014 - 22:40

  +1

  Garbage product. Snake oil extraordinaire.

  I used to work at an AppleCentre. NEVER did this product 'protect' anybody's computer or save data. I'm speaking from experience with actually trying to use a fundamentally broken application for its intended use. Don't waste your money!

  It gets many good reviews, but they are mostly written by tech journalists who have no idea whatsoever about hard disk technology, and you'll find that NONE of them have actually had it detect and repair a real-life error. Everything they write is based on reading a press-release or playing around with the flashy interface for ten minutes. Many real user reviews point to people who find it to be a completely waste of money when something actually goes wrong. Or people who've had it installed for ten years and incorrectly think it's been somehow protecting them, yet statistically speaking they would never have had a problem ever to begin with, even without this software installed.

  I have a pile of about fifteen known-faulty hard disks I use to test hard disk test/recovey apps for effectiveness. ALL disks pass TechTool Pro's disk checks. TechTool Pro's disk checker is read-only, and does not perform read/write/verify checks, therefore it is completely worthless. A disk sector could read fine, but can't be reliably written to. It also can't be re-allocated as a faulty sector by the hard disk's firmware if is not written to. If on the rare occasion an error is detected with TechTool Pro, it does not allow advanced recovery from non-damaged sectors but simply tells you that you need to buy a new hard disk and replace it. It won't assist in detecting damaged files so they can be ignored or recovered from backup. However even the most basic Windows disk check software nearly immediately detects errors with the disks, and offers to attempt repair or recovery, and the better ones display which files are affected.

  The blurb says "Techtool Pro helps you recover your data from corrupted drives or volumes that don't mount on the desktop to save the data to another location" - In practice it does NOT WORK, because it can ONLY do a sector-scan, which WILL fail if you have faulty sectors that cannot be read on your hard disk. Good recovery software detects and remembers which sectors are faulty, and will skip these and concentrate on trying to recover data from good sectors. TechTool tries to blindly read ALL sectors, so as soon as it hits a bad sector the recovery fails, the drive crashes, or the whole computer locks up.

  Even the front page on their own website states that it does not do anything - "Sadly, if something is physically wrong with the drive, it will need to be backed up and replaced" - this is rubbish also. Many times a hard disk may have a few faulty sectors, which good software can re-map and ignore. The hard disk will continue to work as it should indefinitely, as long as those parts are ignored. ALL HARD DISKS DO THIS INTERNALLY ANYWAY. But they need the host operating system to help them to detect where the faults are then inform them of the error, so they can be zeroed-out or ignored. A basic read/write/verify will assist in this procedure, but TTP does not do it.

  S.M.A.R.T. data is essentially worthless as a way of detecting hard disk failures. More often than not the hard disk will just die on you with no warning. It's false security, but amazing the number of people who proclaim that "TechTool will protect me from data loss, so I don't keep backups." Why? Because that's what it claims. It protects you.

  Many people have told me I was lying and that "TechTool found many hard disk errors and repaired them for me" - when I checked the logs, it turns out their file directories were occasionally being corrupted, and TechTool would detect that damage. But THE DIRECTORY CORRUPTION WAS ORIGINALLY CAUSE BY A FAULTY HARD DISK that TechTool did NOT detect in the first place!! The Mac file system is a journaled file system that automatically repairs itself. If there are errors, they will be caused by bad blocks on your hard disk. When I took out the customer's hard disk after it eventually stopped working completely, a disk test with a REAL disk test tool detected read/write errors that TechTool completely missed. It was masking the problem by finding corrupted files, rebuilding them then copying them to a new part of the disk. It did nothing to detect the disk errors, or try to repair them by re-mapping the faulty sectors.

  KEEP AWAY!!

  • 

    timmypete on 21/07/2014 - 23:57

    Whoa. Huge post by someone who clearly doesn't like the product. I never represented this as a miracle cure and you seem to be honing down on one particular function of the tool. I think we'd agree that its usually overpriced, but thats partly why I shared this deal.

    Yes, I've found Diskwarrior has worked better in certain circumstances where TTP struggled. But by the same token, it has been saved my skin fixing volume directory issues on machines improperly powered down which subsequently wouldn't boot and Disk Utility couldn't/wouldn't fix. Its also a quick and easy way to check memory for those without access to ASD or other internal tools. I think pinning some of the limitations of S.M.A.R.T. checks on just one piece of software is also a bit rich as this is a limitation of anything that utilises it.

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      greenie4242 on 22/07/2014 - 01:01

      +1

      I wasn't negging the deal as such, but the product which promises so much but delivers so little. BTW I wasn't the one who negged your comment above, as I welcome proper criticism.

      I agree with you in a case where a computer has been improperly powered down, TTP can occasionally help by repairing volume damage. DiskWarrior can do the same though, and doesn't promise the world. DiskWarrior is also the same price as TTP (normally) but as you point out, for US$25 TTP is currently cheaper. However, I had two clients who lost entire hard disks after they used TTP to try to rebuild their corrupted volumes, but the volumes were corrupted due to bad blocks on the hard disks which TTP failed to detect. So after it tried to transfer the repaired volume directory to the bad blocks, the hard disks crashed again. They would have been better off without it.

      I probably should have mentioned DiskWarror before, as it repairs things that TTP doesn't. But I was typing on my mobile before and wanted to quickly write a post to hopefully warn people about the dangers of relying on this product to do what it says, and so they can do their own research before purchasing.

      I don't like when products are inherently broken and have been for years. I did email Micromat years ago describing the issues, and even offered to post them some of my known-faulty hard disks that tested as OK with TTP to help improve their product. I really WANTED it to work, I HATED having to physically remove hard disks then use Windows to properly test them, it wasted a lot of my time. But their response (I don't have access to it unfortunatey as it was on an old work email) was that very few people had complained about it before. Therefore not an issue. Followed by some marketing spiel about 'always striving to improve their products'. Yet it's still not fixed.

      You mention quick and easy memory checks - but memory checks done with TTP are not to be trusted as they run AFTER the operating system starts up, meaning any memory that's being used by the OS is not accessible to test. Their own screenshot even says "The Memory Test uses a carefully selected collection of algorithms to thoroughly exercise the available free RAM in the computer…" - FREE RAM, not ALL RAM. And yes, I have ALSO come across three computers which had bad memory that TTP did not detect. In two of those cases, after swapping memory modules from bank 1 to bank 2 then testing again TTP eventually detected the bad one, but the other was a laptop with one memory socket so that wasn't possible. Testing the memory module in another computer detected the problem immediately, but TTP said it was fine when tested on the original laptop.

      I'm not complaining about the limitations of S.M.A.R.T. technology, I'm complaining about the way it is advertised by the software publishers:

      A single click of your mouse runs a SMART Check of your hard drive to detect impending drive failure

      This implies it will detect if your hard disk is about to fail. Rubbish. It will detect known problems, but it has no way of detecting impending failure.

      TTP also will not fix Windows hard disks, which many people use - think nearly everything without an Apple logo, and some things with. It won't repair or recover from flash drives, digital camera memory cards, even corrupt iPods. If you have a BootCamp volume, it will do nothing to protect it. Corrupted disk image? Forget it. It is a very limited product, but promises so many things.

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        timmypete on 22/07/2014 - 09:10

        All fair points, and I'm keeping an eye out for a Diskwarrior deal as my copy is about 4 years old and doesn't work on my current hardware.

        Given what you've said about the memory testing, do you recommend any alternative tool? I'm mainly able to swap units out into a windows machine and run memtest off it, but it'd be nice to get something that runs on Apple hw as I no longer have access to ASD.

      • 

        ACTGBilly on 22/07/2014 - 21:53

        @tplen1: I voted just because this is the best tech discussion I've ever seen on Ozbargain. I would love to have Greenie work on my Macs anyday!

      • 

        greenie4242 on 23/07/2014 - 04:57

        @ACTGBilly: Sorry @ACTGBilly, I used to do it full-time, but don't have time to support Macs anymore. :)

        @tplen1: I find it very frustrating when Apple bring out a new model then nearly every piece of software has to be updated to support it, and as you've found out your 4 year old Diskwarrior software is now essentially worthless as it doesn't support your current computer. I was sick of having to have a different CD or DVD for every model and having to maintain ten versions of software to support only six years worth of products, so unfortunately I had to stop supporting Mac and keeping current a few years ago. Unfortunately I can't recommend any specific memory test tool now, as I just don't know what's available for current models.

        The only tool I had success with that performs read/write/verify hard disk checks for Mac OS X is Drive Genius. Sorry I didn't mention it before but I don't deal often with Mac anymore and had to literally go and dig my old Mac out from under a pile of tool boxes to turn it on and find out the name. According to their website it's now used by Apple at the Genius Bar:
        http://www.prosofteng.com/products/drive_genius.php
        http://www.prosofteng.com/products/drive_genius_features.php

        Previously Apple used to use a cut-down version of TechTool Pro for some AppleCare plans, which is why I found out first-hand how awfully lacking the software was. Apple's system wouldn't even let me order replacement parts unless I could verify with software and an error code that the disk was bad, so I had to sometimes take out nearly fifty small screws to remove laptop hard disks and put them in a Windows PC to get an error message! It wasted many hours each week. After I saw a pattern of known-failures testing OK with TechTool Pro, I contacted both them and Apple Australia but neither took any notice, as their operations are based overseas anyway. Any comments I left on official Apple forums were quickly deleted, despite trying to be polite and merely state the facts.

        I really wish I could find the original reply to my message to Micromat about why their software does not support Read/Write/Verify, but it seems that it was either in a locked forum or was stored on an old email address that I don't have access to. But I just found this gem on their own TTP forums, which shows how completely clueless Micromat technicians are about hard disk bad blocks:

        http://www.micromat.com/component/kunena/techtool-pro-5/373-…

        TechTool Pro can detect bad blocks that have not yet been remapped to spares, but it cannot order the disk driver to remap them. Most bad blocks encountered by the disk driver get remapped to spares immediately (“on-the-fly”) in the course of normal use of the drive, but in some cases, the bad blocks do not get remapped during normal use.
        <snip>
        If you get a new drive and run the Surface Scan, or you have just run the Surface Scan on a drive that has not been previously examined for bad blocks, and one or two bad blocks are found, then it is likely that a small amount of the magnetic media has flaked off since the drive left the factory. This is not uncommon, and is cause for neither panic nor complacency. (Many new drives have one or two bad blocks that have developed since the drive left the factory, but most users are unaware of them, because they do not have the Surface Scan.) Back up the drive, reformat it with Disk Utility with the option to zero all data chosen, and put the drive into use.
        <snip>
        If the Surface Scan ever finds more than one or two bad blocks, the drive should be replaced.

        Above are just some snippets posted by a Micromat technician, in which he completely contradicts himself. He first says bad blocks are OK, to be expected, that every drive has them. But then says that TechTool Pro can't repair them, the drive needs to be reformatted. Then goes on to say that if you find more than two bad blocks the drive is bad and should be replaced. But he also says in another part of the message (too large to quote) that all drives automatically re-map bad blocks. However he doesn't seem aware that hard disks are able to be instructed by software to map-out and ignore newly detected bad blocks. Other tools don't require reformatting the entire drive, and certainly don't require it be replaced.

        If you have Boot Camp and can boot into Windows, there are many good tools available to test hard disks and memory. Even the most basic Windows XP Check Disk tool (It comes standard with Windows 98, XP, Vista, 7 and can be accecced by right-clicking the hard disk, going to 'Properties' then clicking 'Tools' - 'Error-checking') has a 'Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors' feature, which far surpasses TTP's hard disk 'recovery'. It won't fix failing hard disks but if you just have a couple of bad blocks it's more than adequate.

        EDIT: I just found people talking about a tool for OS X called 'Scannerz' - I have NEVER tested it or used it so won't to make any comments on its effectiveness, but it might be worth checking out:
        http://www.scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html