An important application in your maintenance toolbox is the Disk Utility, which is located in the Utilities folder within your Applications folder. When you first run this program, it looks something like Figure 1, displaying all the physical disks and volumes on your system.
Figure 1: The familiar face of Tiger’s Disk Utility.
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- Repair a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac. Disk Utility can fix certain disk problems—for example, multiple apps quit unexpectedly, a file is corrupted, an external device doesn’t work properly, or your computer won’t start up. Disk Utility can’t detect or repair all problems that a disk may have.
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The Disk Utility application has its own toolbar that you can toggle on and off. Click the lozenge-shaped button at the upper-right corner of the window to display or hide the toolbar.
Unlike fixing disk errors, you can verify and repair permissions on any volume that contains a Mac OS X installation (whether it was used to boot your Mac or not). In order to verify or repair, you must be logged in as an admin-level user. How to add a volume to an APFS container. If you’re having problems with a disk, Disk Utility can check the disk and repair problems it detects. How to repair a disk. To browse the Disk Utility User Guide, click Table of Contents at the top of the page. If a disk in a disk set on Mac.
Displaying the goods on your disks
The volume tree structure on the left of the Disk Utility window lists both the physical disks and the partitions that you’ve set up. A partition is nothing more than another word for volume, which is the formatted section of a disk that contains data. A single physical hard drive can contain several partitions. The information display at the bottom of the Disk Utility window contains data about both the volumes and the partitions on your hard drive.
To illustrate: Clicking a drive labeled at the top of the tree displays a description of the drive itself, including its total capacity, interface (connection type), and whether the drive is internal or external, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Display data on a physical drive.
Clicking the tree entry for a partition, however, displays information about the type of formatting, the total capacity of the partition and how much of that is used, and the number of files and folders stored on the partition (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Display data on a volume.
Playing doctor with First Aid
From the First Aid pane, Disk Utility can be used to verify (or check) any disk (well, almost any disk) for errors, as well as repair any errors that it finds. Here are the two exceptions when the buttons are disabled:
- The start-up disk: Disk Utility can’t verify or repair the start-up disk — that’s Mac talk for the boot drive that contains the Mac OS X system that you’re using at the moment — which makes sense if you think about it because that drive is currently being used!
- If you have multiple operating systems on multiple disks, you can boot from another Mac OS X installation on another drive to check your current start-up disk. Or, you can boot your system from the original Mac OS X installation CD and run Disk Utility from the Installation menu.
- Your start-up disk is automatically verified and repaired (if necessary) during the boot procedure, so you really don’t need to worry about checking the start-up disk.
- Write-protected disks: Although you can use the Disk Utility to verify CDs, DVDs, and write-protected removable disk drives (like a write-protected Zip disk), it can’t repair them.
- You also can’t repair a disk that has open files that are currently being used. If you’re running an application from a drive or you’ve opened a document that’s stored on that drive, you won’t be able to repair that drive.
You can also elect to verify and repair permissions (also called privileges) on a disk; these are the read/write. If you can’t save or move a file that you should be able to access, check that drive for permissions problems. Unlike fixing disk errors, you can verify and repair permissions on any volume that contains a Mac OS X installation (whether it was used to boot your Mac or not).
In order to verify or repair, you must be logged in as an admin-level user.
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To verify or repair a drive, first select the target volume/partition in the list at the left. To check the contents of the drive and display any errors, click the Verify Disk button. Or, to verify the contents of the drive and fix any problems, click the Repair Disk button. Disk Utility displays any status or error messages in the scrolling list; if you’ve got eagle eyes, you’ll note that the window can be resized so that you can expand it to display more messages. (You can also drag the dot between the left and right panes to expand the list.)
Check your disks once every two or three days. If your Mac is caught by a power failure or Mac OS X locks up, however, it’s a good idea to immediately check disks after you restart your Mac. (Don’t forget that the start-up volume is automatically checked and repaired, if necessary.)
Repair a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac
Disk Utility can fix certain disk problems—for example, multiple apps quit unexpectedly, a file is corrupted, an external device doesn’t work properly, or your computer won’t start up. Disk Utility can’t detect or repair all problems that a disk may have.
If you run First Aid on a disk, Disk Utility checks the partition maps on the disk and performs some additional checks, and then checks each volume. If you run First Aid on a volume, Disk Utility verifies all the contents of that volume only.
- In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, choose View > Show All Devices.
- Note: If you’re checking your startup disk or startup volume, restart your computer in macOS Recovery, select Disk Utility in the macOS Utilities window, then click Continue. If you check your startup volume (Macintosh HD), make sure you also check your data volume (Macintosh HD - Data).
- In the sidebar, select a disk or volume, then click the First Aid button .
- If Disk Utility tells you the disk is about to fail, back up your data and replace the disk—you can’t repair it. Otherwise, continue to the next step.
- Click Run, then click Continue.
- If Disk Utility reports that the disk appears to be OK or has been repaired, you’re done. You can click Show Details to see more information about the repairs. Otherwise, you may need to do one of the following.
- If Disk Utility reports “overlapped extent allocation” errors, two or more files occupy the same space on your disk, and at least one of them is likely to be corrupted. You need to check each file in the list of affected files. Most of the files in the list have aliases in a DamagedFiles folder at the top level of your disk.
- If you can replace a file or re-create it, delete it.
- If it contains information you need, open it and examine its data to make sure it hasn’t been corrupted.
- If Disk Utility can’t repair your disk, or you receive a report that the First Aid process failed, try to repair the disk or partition again. If that doesn’t work, back up as much of your data as possible, reformat the disk, reinstall macOS, then restore your backed-up data.
- If Disk Utility reports “overlapped extent allocation” errors, two or more files occupy the same space on your disk, and at least one of them is likely to be corrupted. You need to check each file in the list of affected files. Most of the files in the list have aliases in a DamagedFiles folder at the top level of your disk.
If your Mac has a Fusion Drive and you see a flashing question mark or alert, see the troubleshooting section of the Apple Support article About Fusion Drive, a storage option for some Mac computers.
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If you continue to have problems with your disk or it can’t be repaired, it may be physically damaged and need to be replaced. For information about servicing your Mac, see Find out how to service or repair your Mac.
Mac Os X Disk Repair
Jul 2, 2020 5:32 PM