installing apple hardware test (AHT) from original disc 2

bobbo44 wrote:

I did open the bundled application from the original disk 2. There are a number of apps such as time machine, mail, finder, and others. No way to select only AHT. So I chose not to proceed.

You don't access the AHT that way. You are supposed to boot the Mac with the DVD which contains AHT. Insert the DVD #2 and reboot the Mac and hold the "C" key immediately after the startup chime in order to boot from the DVD which should boot to the AHT.

I used to run PCs which had a defragment option for the drive. I was looking for the same option on my old MB; but could not find.

There is no defragging option in macOS. You just run First Aid and with older versions of macOS you can also run "Repair Permissions" using Disk Utility.

Also I have tried to uninstall a couple of apps that I had installed in this past year along with a local university class that I took. These apps were Google Earth and Stellarium. I followed the online instruction for uninstalling Google Earth and that did not speedup my MB startup. I have not tried to uninstall Stellarium yet.

Only apps that are running all the time will impact system performance. They would be the apps which install drivers or otherwise launch automatically during boot or login. At most I would only expect Google Earth to be checking for updates (sometimes Google is quite aggressive on checking for updates multiple times a day).

It has been too many years since I worked with those DVDs, but I believe they allowed you to select what would be installed. You are correct that you don't want to install anything from them if you are running a newer version of macOS. I don't recall being able to install the AHT. You are only supposed to boot from the DVD which will allow the AHT diagnostics to run from the DVD without installing anything to the laptop. Maybe DVD #1 has the instructions. IIRC, you just boot from the 2nd DVD by holding down the "C" key while booting (you may also be able to Option Boot the laptop which should in theory show the bootable options on the DVD).

If your Mac shipped with OS X DVDs from the factory, then you only need to boot the 2nd DVD which contains the Apple Hardware Test. With the DVD containing the AHT in the optical drive just restart the laptop and hold down the "C" key to boot from the DVD. I believe the DVD contains instructions for running the AHT if you look at the README file when mounting the DVD while booted normally.

However, there is a very good chance that you will be unable to run the AHT or the Apple Diagnostics downloaded from the link provided by @BDAqua. When Apple updated the system firmware with macOS 10.12.4+ to allow for Internet Recovery Mode and the online Apple Diagnostics, Apple also broke ability to boot from these older methods. I had personal experience with these types of boot issues for some other boot files and it required Apple to update their boot files for us (it took Apple a long time to fix some of them for us). We still have some systems that won't boot certain items, but I've never had the time to properly document firmware revisions to track the problem to know which system firmware versions have these issues.

If you cannot boot the AHT or Apple Diagnostics, then it will be much easier to describe the problem with your laptop to see if there are alternative methods of identifying the problem. Most problems can be narrowed down to these things:

• Third party software issues
• Corrupt file system
• Corrupt OS
• Failing hard drive
• Bad memory or memory slot or incompatible memory
• Issue with an external device
• Bad GPU (15" or 17" models)

There are alternate ways to detect some of these problems while for others there is only trial & error and noticing patterns. The Apple Diagnostics themselves rarely detect hardware issues. The Apple Diagnostics usually only detect power & sensor & fan issues. The diagnostics fail to detect many hard drive & memory failures. There are third party apps/utilities which can test these components and usually are more reliable/more likely to discover a problem. The Apple Diagnostics are definitely useful if they are available and work. The only useful diagnostic is one which reports a problem. A passing diagnostic does not mean the hardware is good.

Edit: The error you get trying to access the online Apple Diagnostics indicates a network issue of some sort. Try power cycling your router and waiting at least five minutes for the router to finish booting. Try a PRAM Reset (hold for at least three chimes). Connect your laptop directly to the router using an Ethernet cable for a faster more reliable network connection which bypasses hard to troubleshoot WiFi issues. Try running the Apple Diagnostics from another location preferably one with a different ISP.

Apple Hardware Test (AHT)

Description

Apple computers ship with a pre-installed suite of hardware diagnostic tools, known as Apple Hardware Test (AHT). In principle you can start them by holding the d key while booting. Newer models support holding option d to load AHT over the internet. Refer to the official Apple documentation for details: Using AHT on Intel-based Macs, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite. Apple redesigned the AHT, now called Apple Diagnostics, for Macs introduced after June 2013. Consult the reference codes to interpret the results.

If however, you reinstalled an older computer from scratch, the diagnostic tools might no longer be available. Unless you have the original disks that came with your computer, there seems to be no way to restore the AHT.

It happens that Apple provides disk images with AHT for most computers, but does not make the links publicly available. Various blogs and forums, mostly Riven by Five and MacForum.ro have gathered a list of download links. The rest were obtained by scraping http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Hardware_Test/ for all the links of the form 0(18|22)-\d{4}-A.dmg.

Even though there's no guarantee that this list is correct or complete, some links can come in very handy to whoever is trying to debug hardware problems.

You can use the following terminal commands to determine the model and board ID of your computer:

sysctl hw.model | awk '{ print $2 }'

ioreg -l | awk -F\" '/board-id/ { print $4 }'

Download the AHT for your computer model and use the contents to restore the /System/Library/CoreServices/.diagnostics folder, then reboot while holding d to start the diagnostic tools. Alternatively you may try with a bootable USB stick, as described below. This is also the preferred way on OS X 10.11 or later, where the System Integrity Protection (SIP) no longer allows writing to system folders.

When trying to open an old dmg you may get the error 'legacy image should be converted'. To convert it to a newer format, open Disk Utility, in the menu Images click on Convert and select the dmg to convert and save it under a new name.

Note that there is no one-to-one correspondence between hardware model and AHT. For some models no hardware test could be found, while others seem to have multiple AHT. As the differences are not clear, feel free to try them out, to see which one works best for your hardware.

https://github.com/upekkha/AppleHardwareTest