Apple provides some excellent diagnostic tools, particularly for newer hardware. But memory and hard disks often require third party utilities to troubleshoot thoroughly. The Mac operating system also supports many fantastic third-party utilities. However, as Apple computers fully support most other operating systems and software, this allows us to use a wide range of software tools. Two utilities we use often are pieces of Windows software.
The primary disk scanning software we rely on is Victoria. Victoria is a hard disk surface scan software that runs under Windows, and provides a low-level scan of the entire disk for either SATA or IDE drives. It reports on each individual block, and sorts them into categories based on health. We use a bootable utility disk named Hiren’s BootCD for running it. This is a free download for a bootable CD with a lightweight Windows XP installation. It contains many utilities, some of which will be relevant to Mac troubleshooting, and some not. Unfortunately the current version, 15.2, does not support the keyboards on Apple computers, which renders it useless (so we use the older 15.0).
MemTest86 is an incredibly lightweight (several-hundred kilobytes) utility, which similar to Hiren’s BootCD, is burned to a CD and booted off of. MemTest86 thoroughly tests all Random Access Memory in the computer it runs on, with virtually no overhead. Whereas running memory tools in a standard operating system prevents the test from finding errors in the sections of RAM actively used by the operating system. While it looks like a Windows bluescreen error, it will give an obvious red highlight if an error is found. MemTest86 is also available on the Hiren’s BootCD.
If you are so inclined as to give these a try, some research into using these tools effectively is definitely recommended before diving in. With the BootCD in particular, we definitely recommend caution, as there are many tools on the disc for erasing drives and other such activities. We are not responsible for any issues caused by using these!