How do you support Mac users if you're a Windows-oriented IT professional? eWEEK Knowledge Center contributor Ivan Drucker shares some hands-on techniques, tools and advice on saving the day for Mac developers, designers and production staff.It
goes without saying that every IT pro has a toolkit at the ready—the
hardware, software and knowledge necessary to diagnose and resolve
issues. It's no different on the Mac side of the fence. Mac OS X may be
a bit different than Windows but both systems share plenty of problems
in common. Macs are no strangers to corrupted hard disks, failed RAM,
network connection issues and so on.
In my first article,
I talked about how Macs are increasingly popping up in the workplace,
posing a challenge for Windows-oriented IT support professionals. This
time out, I want to share with you some essential tools and techniques
which will make your job easier and which will help you better support
the Mac users in your enterprise. What follows are the tools and tips I
use regularly to keep Macs running smoothly. (Note: I'm an enthusiast
of several of the products below, but I am in no way affiliated with
any of their vendors.)
Alsoft’s DiskWarrior
An absolutely indispensable utility is Alsoft’s DiskWarrior.
If you do not have this in your organization, stop what you're doing
and order it. I cannot describe how many times DiskWarrior has made a
drive boot, made a lost directory reappear or otherwise saved the day.
If you remember Norton Disk Doctor from the DOS days—where a simple
program magically just seemed to fix everything—that's DiskWarrior now.
The best way to use DiskWarrior is to run it on your own laptop,
connected to the user's Mac via FireWire Disk Mode (which I'll get into
in a minute). You can also start up the user's Mac from the DiskWarrior
CD but it takes a very long time and won't work on the newest Macs.
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