Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals portable boot key peripheral

I have those tools on a flash drive. All ~25 of them fit nicely on a 1gb flash drive if done properly. Those ASD are "Apple Service Diagnostic" images, basically a hopped up version of the AHT Apple Hardware Test. ASD are only available to AASP's, but I think you can still download any of the AHT. Problem with them is there is generally one AHT for each and every model, so there are a LOT of them. An ASD typically covers ~15 models. (some more, some less) The boot picker starts getting difficult to use with more than 20 things to select from, because unlike the PPC that would grid things, the intel picker displays only one horizontal row and starts to squeeze things down and abbreviate the volume names. If you put all the AHT on a single flash drive it would be a problem picking the one you wanted to use.

The service drive I'm referring to has 14 or so bootable volumes on it plus a data volume. The ones I work with now have the OS installers from 10.3.4 through 10.8, (including 10.4.7 intel) and have an installed service OS from 10.5.8 to 10.8. The data partition is used to store service tools (disk warrior etc) and also as a place to recover data or back up to from failing internal drives. (usability varies depending on available space, which depends on drive capacity - 250gb doesn't leave room for all the data, 320 doesn't have much left for data recovery, 500+ is good) I also store common installers on the data partition. (iLife, Office, etc)

I use a complex rsync script to keep the service drives here updated from my master drive. Every computer tech should have these. I feel sorry for the windows techs that can't easily do this, it's a tremendous time-saver, and helps the sales people up front be able to assist me with easier things. And it's monumentally faster than booting or installing from disc, flash drive, or over the network.