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Level 1

14 points

Need advice on hard drive/optical drive testing software

I've been tasked to sell some of our inventory of old Macs. This include some PowerPC based PowerBooks, a few G5 dual core Power Macs, but mostly they're going to be MacBook Pro's, iMacs, and Mac Mini's. I'm paying most attention to the Intel stuff because most of the PPC stuff is just getting a little too old. NOTE: I am not on here to announce a sale. Please do not ask me where, when, and if the units will be sold. I don't want this thread turning into a spam-fest!

Most of the Intel units have CoreDuo processessors, some of the mini's I believe actually have Core Solo. These are all being upgraded to new systems, as you might guess. All units have their original software because when these are given to an employee to use we take the software and lock it in a file cabinet, which prevents them from losing it or doing something else with it. We have fairly tight control over our machines. I do not believe any of these units are capable of running Lion or later OSes due to their processors. Most systems are running Leopard or Snow Leopard.

In any case, we can do basic hardware tests on the units using AHT, but AHT seems to have little or no testing capability for doing surface scans on hard drives or optical drives. These are, ironically, the most likely things that will break. We want it verified these are in working order because we will be offering a limited warranty on them.

What's available for testing hard drives and optical drives?

As an FYI, having Apple do this testing is out of the question due to cost.

Posted on Sep 28, 2013 6:29 PM

169 replies

Nov 3, 2015 11:02 AM in response to CaptH

If you have a drive with another Mavericks or Yosemite partition on it and you boot off that partition, you can freely modify El Capitan partition and then reboot into that and the changes will hold, at least for files anyway.

I put the old non-turquoise folders from Mavericks onto El Capitan by tarring them up while booted in Mavericks, copying the tar files to the El Capitan disk, and then untarred them. I then deleted all the caches on the El Capitan partition, and then rebooted into El Capitan. When the system came up all the folders were the light blue types on Mavericks, not the (ugly, IMHO) turquoise folders installed by default. Clearing the caches in /Library/Caches, /System/Library/Caches, and ~/Library/Caches is needed or it won't take effect immediately. I haven't tried this with something like cDock.

Fred1956

Level 1

10 points

Dec 15, 2015 11:58 AM in response to MrWilliams201

I tried that and the system got a little squirrelly with respect to rootless mode. Maybe it worked on earlier releases or maybe you did it to less significant files but on mine it caused some problems. Not earth shattering, but never the less, problems. Just turn off rootless mode. I'm on a desktop behind two firewalls. If someone is getting into my system than I probably have more to worry about than rootless mode anyway.

ZV137

Level 1

54 points

Dec 21, 2015 10:42 AM in response to ThomasB2010

ThomasB2010 wrote:

A message shows up in the log files. One thing you might try, or at least it used to work before release was to try the "ps" command with rootless mode enabled and disabled. It reported OK when disabled, but put out nonsense stats for disabled.

ps is now working, at least on 10.11.2 it is.

May 12, 2016 11:15 AM in response to R.K.Orion

Run without rootless mode. That's what I'm doing. I'm already behind a firewall on my router and another one on my systems.

Need advice on hard drive/optical drive testing software