Disk Repair and Installation?

Lately my Mac has been acting slow and some applications crash a lot more often then they should be. I want to give it a new clean slate but I still want to have those files. When I go to install it from the CD, under the options, it says that I can archive the files. Will this clean all the other stuff AND keep my files or only keep certain files and delete everything else. Also, should I just put all the files on another thing (such as another hard drive or 38GB hard drive) and just reinstall Leopard again then put the files back on? Will it work?
PS I am a Mac-newbie and have used a PC since forever, so things like this don't come easy. I suggest you talk to me like I'm a two year old.

I concur - it's often much simpler than you think to get your mac running faster.
Reinstalling the OS is NOT the most painless way (if you're dealing with the Mac OS at least - I know Windoze users love reformatting their computers)
My comp was running unbearably slow, and apps would give me the spinning beachball of doom fairly often - once or twice a week.
These are the things that made the biggest difference:
*Not using FireFox* actually solved most of the problems - somehow leaving FireFox open for days on end would cause Safari, iPhoto, Excel and other memory-intensive apps to slow down and eventually die.
(actually I still use FireFox sometimes, but always remember to quit it when I'm done. I now leave Safari open for weeks at a time). The windows version of FF has never given me this problem.
Another gigantic slow-down culprit is *not having enough free space on your main (root) drive*.
I try to keep more than 2 times my RAM free at all times (this way I never get close to having too little). for example, my "About this Mac…" says I have 2G RAM, so I right now have 5.5Gigs of space free on my internal harddrive.
That actually took some effort - My pictures folder was massive, as was my music folder.
So I bought an external firewire harddrive, and moved those folder to there (and make aliases in my home-folder to the new location, and told iTunes 7 iPhoto to use the new locations).
Now, my Downloads folder, Pictures, Music, Movies & Research Papers (lots of PDFs & Word Docs) are all on an external drive. I know it sounds kinda ridiculous, but these folders simply get bigger and bigger over time, so keeping them in my home folder will eventually result in too little space on the main drive.

Similar Messages

I installed Lion online and i ran disk repair and found that i needed to do a repair but i have no start up disk. How do i repair without burning a disk?

I installed Lion online and i ran disk repair and found that i needed to do a repair but i have no start up disk. How do i repair without burning a disk?

Lion creates a Recovery partition on your harddrive. You will need to boot from startup.
click here
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

Cant start up on my Macbook pro. All I get is a grey spinning wheel. Tried all the Startup key combinations and nothing works. I reset the NVRAM and nothing. I booted with start up disk , ran disk repair and all is ok. Tried to re-install OS but when I ge

Can not start up on my Macbook pro. All I get is a grey spinning wheel. Tried all the Startup key combinations and nothing works. I reset the NVRAM and nothing. I booted with start up disk , ran disk repair and all is ok. Tried to re-install OS but when I get to designating drive its blank. When I go to startup disk there is a "?" mark. When I restart under startup disk search for a drive it still comes up with nothing. Before I got the grey spinning wheel I had a locked screen. Could not move curser or click on anything. Finally just shut down. Thank you in advance for any help!

Shouldn't still have a 'beachballing'... if the drive is being found and the system is trying to boot from it but is having problems, I would suggest looking over ds store's user tip - Step by step to fix your Mac.
It's likely either something corrupt in your system files or a failing hard drive. But follow ds's steps until you find the cause of the problem.
Good luck,
Clinton

Directory Damage, what can be used for Disk Repair and Virus Detection?

Hi,
My eMac is acting up. Yesterday I started getting these messages that I needed to restart my computer (message was in a brown box window with an icon of a start up button in background).
I did the disk repair using Start up CD and it came back with "invalid key......." or something like that, and when I tried to repair it, it tried to repair the B-Tree's but then said it could not repair the problem.
I have Diskwarrior 3.03 Build 39, on a CD and on my FW Ext HD, which has a clone of my Mac HD.
Diskwarrior could not produce a graph of Mac HD because the directory was damaged. When I did a rebuild it hung on step 9 comparing directories, said there was 7 million + tests. ( I let it hang on step 9 for 15 hrs. to see if maybe it was just taking a long time due to corrupt directory). I finally clicked on Skip and got to the report page. I could do a preview, but the replace button is greyed out. When I was comparing the sizes of each folder, in both preview and original, I got a can not calculate error message on a few of them. The size of Mac HD in preview compared to the one in Original was different by 4 gbs. A week ago I repaired the Mac HD and did a Diskwarrior directory repair on all my HD's.
Before I do any reformatting of HD or other drastic measures, I was wondering what is safe to use for disk repair and virus detection. I know there is Norton System Works 3.0, Norton AntiVirus and TechTool, are these the only ones? Are these safe to use? Are there any other programs that can repair directory damage?
Thank you in advance,
Deb
eMac 2005 1.42GHz Combo Drive 256MB Tiger 10.4 75GB Mac OS X (10.4) Western Digital (WD) 160GB FW Ext & WD 320gb Media FW Ext, Creative Speakers

The long-standing rule of thimb has been that if Disk Warrior can't repair a mungled disk directory, then you're looking at reformatting or replacing the hard drive. Since this is a week-old hard drive, I'd suspect the replacement hard drive is itself bad. It might save you grief in the long run to contact the vendor who sold you the drive and inquire about their warrenty. You might want to first run the file system check utility fsck as described in Using Disk Utility and fsck
Directory repair and antivirus protection are different critters. Norton AV is mostly safe (if you don't mind it's track record of false positives) and is used by the IT department at the lab where I work. Norton SystemWorks, AKA Disk Doctor Kervorkian, is most assuredly NOT safe. For every poster reporting something nice about it, you'll find at least 2 dozen cursing it. It has a known track record of detecting problems no other utility finds and of "repairing" drives such that nothing can then read or repair the drive short of low-level reformatting (and occasionally even that fails).
Tech Tool Pro 4 has a good reputation, as does Drive Genius. Tiger OS X 10.4.2 and later include a version of Disk Utility that can for the first time also make effective B-tree and keys out of order and overlapped extent repairs. Still, my personal gut feeling is that if Disk Warrior is choking on the hard drive, you're looking at reformatring while zeros the drive (zeroing should detect and map out bad physical secotrs).
You can also refer to Disk First Aid: What to do when it finds an error and to Handling "overlapped extent allocation" errors reported by Disk Utility or fsck

None of the changes I make to system preference or the dock will hold after restart. I've cleared the RAM, run disk repair and reinstalled the OS. Now what?

None of the changes I make to system preference or the dock will hold after restart. I've cleared the RAM, run disk repair and reinstalled the OS. Now what?

MobileMe closed on July 31, 2012.
It is true that the only way to sync your Mac with iCloud is to upgrad. You need to be running OS X Lion 10.7.2 or higher in order to sync your Mac with iCloud. At this point, you can upgrade directly to OS X Mountain Lion from the version of OS X you are now running (10.6.8). You can purchase and download the Mountain Lion upgrade from the Mac App Store for $19.99. After upgrading you will see iCloud in System Preferences. This guide explains how to sync your Mac with iCloud after upgrading: http://www.apple.com/icloud/setup/mac.html.
Once all your devices are signed into the same iCloud account and you have turned on your iCloud data syncing, you will be able to keep them all in sync using iCloud. You will still have to sync with iTunes to manage your iTunes media such as music, movies, podcasts, etc. You will have the option to either continue backing up automatically with your computer when you sync with iTunes, or to back up your iOS devices automatically to iCloud every 24 hours (as long as they are connected to wifi and your chargers).

Disk repair and startup\dvd drive issues

i'm running 10.6 on a 2ghz macpro - disk repair has found problems on the startup disk. i know i need to boot from another disc to repair the system drive, but i'm having problems doing so.
the dvd drive won't startup from either my original installation discs (tiger) nor my snow leopard dvd. restarting and pressing 'C' does nothing, then the tray opens and the mac starts from my HD.
I have a superduper backup on an internal drive, i can start from this but disk utility won't allow the repair of the main HD, saying it can't unmount it. I'm sure i've done yhis before by creating a temporary admin account and running dick utility from there, but even this isn't working this time.

First, under no circumstances should you try to use a Tiger install disk to repair problems on a Snow Leopard system. You need to use a Snow Leopard disk.
Second, make sure that you are using the disk that you used to install SL on the Mac Pro. It must be a disk that has a system newer or equal to the one that shipped with your machine. If your machine originally shipped with Tiger, but is currently running Snow Leopard, then any retail Snow Leopard disk should be able to boot the machine.
If the machine won't boot from a legit disk that it should be able to boot from, then either the disk itself is damaged or you have a hardware problem. Or, very rarely (I've only ever heard one first-hand report of such a thing), you could have such a severely-corrupted hard drive that it actually prevents you from booting from anything.
Are you able to load DVDs in your machine at all? What happens if you put in the SL disk when the machine is booted from another drive? Are you able to boot into [Apple Hardware Test|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509]? If so, run the extended tests.
I'm not sure why you'd be unable to repair the drive when booted from a backup on a different internal drive. Does that backup drive have the same version of the OS? Are you running Disk Utility from the backup drive or from the drive you're trying to repair?
You could try booting into single-user mode (hold down command-s at startup), then type "fsck -fy" at the command line. When fsck is done, run it again. Continue until either no problems are found or until you're reasonably sure it'll never manage to fix them all.
You could also try getting a copy of [DiskWarrior|http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html] or [TechTool Pro|http://www.micromat.com>, which can fix some things that Disk Utility can't.

Disk Repair and Corrupt Hard Drive

I just replaced the hard drive on my iMac because the computer kept hanging and occasionally shutting down. I've run Disk Utility many times over many months on the old hard drive and the message I received is that the hard drive was corrupt and needed to be repaired; DU reported both an invalid file count and an invalid directory count. I made a clone of the old drive before replacing, and low and behold I still receive the same message when I run DU on the new drive. I reinstalled Snow Leopard and added all upates to 10.6.8 via Software Update before cloning the drive. Is the new drive defective? Do I need to reinstall the OS on the new drive? Other ideas? Thanks.
iMac 5,1
OS 10.6.8
2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo
3G SDRAM

You can try this instead:
Reinstall OS X without erasing the drive
Do the following:
1. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
2. Reinstall Snow Leopard
If the drive is OK then quit DU and return to the installer. Proceed with reinstalling OS X. Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files. After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system.
Download and install the Combo Updater for the version you prefer from support.apple.com/downloads/.
Most likely you had the same problem because it was associated with your existing Home folder. Best to avoid cloning your old system.

Disk repair and Apple Hardware Test says HD has no problem but grey screen still persists on MBP

5 days ago while on vacation, my MBP just froze with the grey screen, apple logo and spinning gear.
I performed all that was instructed on the following discussions:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2570
except Archive and Install installation of MAC OS X and Erase and Install MAC OS X since I was able to save my files in my husband's MBP via Firewire Target Disk Mode. At this point, I am still apprehensive in erasing my files and installing again the MAC OS X.
When I did the Disk Repair under the Disk utilities, it says that my Mac Os X is ok. (It also said ok when I did the fsck -fy when I till did not have my CD when I was on vacation)
I also tried the Apple Hardware Test (AHT) to further l test the hardware of my MBP and performed an extended checking and after an hour, its says that my HD has no problem.
Yet, after all these, when I restart my computer, it still has the grey screen with apple logo and spinning wheel!
Can anyone tell me what else can I do??? Appreciate any help!

I like the free demo of SuperDuper to make clones. It's free, Leopard and Snow ready and is easy to use. If you buy the full version you can do incremental backups.
You should use Disk Utility to do a Disk Repair, as shown in this link, booted up on your install disk, before you make a clone of it. I use DiskWarrior for that instead.
I then partition my external disk, in Disk Utility, with a partition that is the same size , actually a tad bigger, as my system disk. I then use SuperDuper to clone my system disk over to that partition.
With a clone on an external FireWire drive (USB drives are not bootable on PPC Macs but are on some Intel Macs) you can bootup on it to do your repairs, on the main drive, or just run your Mac anytime you have trouble with your main drive.
That's why I like clones better then Time Machine. You can just bootup on them and use your Mac.
On the DiskWarrior thing, I use DW once a month to try and catch errors in my system from getting too far out of hand. It has repaired every little and big issue I have ever had with my three Macs.
And I have had times when Disk Utility's Disk Repair says everything's fine but my system was still having issues. Disk Utility, in my experience, cannot be totally relied on to find and report all issues. It just isn't robust enough.
I run DiskWarrior, it does find errors, repairs them and I'm back in business. I swear by it!
DALE

Disk repair and deleting apps

As a Mac OSX newbie I have 2 random questions:
1.) How do I delete an application? Lets say I want to get rid of Firefox, do I just grab it and drag the app icon to the trash? I am a Windows person and am used to long tendriles of a program going all thru my system, how does OS X handle this?
2.) I have had my MBP for almost a month now, and I do a disk verify on it about every week. Everytime I run it, it tells me there is a minor problem to boot up with the CDs and fix it. Is this normal? I am not doing anything hardcore with my system, emails, Word, things like that mostly; and just wanted to make sure I am not doing anything wrong.
Thanks

Generally speaking, you can delete most programs by selecting their icon and pressing Command-Delete to send it to the Trash; then you empty the Trash. In the case of Firefox and many other applications, they often have support files installed in other places, which you must also remove to get rid of it completely. But even if you fail to do that, it will not interfere with your system operating.
You would need to remove these files/folders to be completely rid of Firefox:
Users/Library/Application Support/Firefox
Users/Library//Caches/Firefox
Users/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox.plist
Some third-party programs and printer drivers have an uninstaller function built-in to their installer. In that case, you run the installer, choose uninstall and it cleans up it's own mess for you.
As for running Disk Utility every week, don't. Every time you start your Mac, it does it's own maintenance, including checking and repairing the disk, so unless you have serious problems to start with, you don't need to do this. Wait until you have a real problem that requires a disk repair process.
Mulder
If this answered you question, please consider awarding some points. Why Reward Points?
iMac G4 700Mhz Mac OS X (10.3.9)

I have a MacBook Pro, it recently started freezing upon startup. It would get to a blue screen and just sit there. I've tried booting in safemode to run disk repair and still doesnt help. If I do manage to get past the blue screen, it still freezes

My mac keeps freezing upon startup. It will get to the blue screen and promptly freeze. If I manage to get past the blue screen, and open up youtube on google chrome, it will freeze before it loads youtube. I've tried safeboot and disk repair, nothing seems to work. I even tried to factory reset it but it wont connect to my internet when I reboot with power + option.. any ideas?

This can be used to boot the machine and delelte enough files to get it to boot normally.
.Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive
Read about storage drive so you can store your extra stuff.
Most commonly used backup methods
Also here to see how a full boot drive slows the machine down
Why is my computer slow?

Disk repair and permission repair and all that jazz ...

Sorry for the double post .... anyway,
This morning I followed all suggestions posted on this board,
and I did my first Disk Repair, twice, (from the DVD) and Permissions Repair from the boot drive. I shut down the system, then started it again five minutes later.
Then I downloaded Cocktail and MacJanitor, and ran permissions repair again. Then and ran both Cocktal and McJanitor applications.
I shut down my system for about five minutes,
started it up again, and nothing is broken still.
Things seem pretty much okay.
I thinkthe system boots up a little bit
quicker than before. But not much ...
The only wierd thing is that my Safari icon was missing form the Dock,
and also my Adobe PE icon on the dock is now a big question mark.
I'm not going to mess with it anymore for about a week. I don't want screw things up.
Thanks to everybody on this board who helped me figure all this out.
Now to my last question, for now anyway:
Do you all think it's a good idea to do the same things to my
G-Raid external firewire drive?
Thanks again.

I did that. thanks.
Do you recommend I do a disk repair on my
external G-Raid firewire drive? It is a
Mac OS Extended format ..
There are no applications in it,
only large video files.
thanks

BF2 disk drive and installation problems (Windows XP Home on a MBP)

So I've taken the leap and installed Windows XP Home on my MacBook Pro. It makes me cringe.
It was not an easy process. Installing Windows took me about 4 hours. There would be an error, I would have to eject the disk, reboot, and the promised 39 minutes seemed to be 5 times slower than it actually was. By the time I got Windows installed it seemed to be running ok, until yesterday.
Yesterday, I tried to install Battlefield 2 Deluxe Edition onto Windows. I inserted the first disc (1 of 5) and my MBP spit it right back out. This happened almost 10 times until finally when viewing "My Computer", the MBP accepted the disk. I then started to install. It froze up a couple of times, so I restarted. Same problem: the MBP wouldn't accept the disk. It finally did, I started install and it finally went. And then, about 4 or 5 percent of the way in, it stopped and said somethign along the lines of "BF2 installation failed, please restart install from the beginning". I did, and got the same message.
Any ideas?
2.0GHz MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.6) 1.5 Gb RAM

Now that I have thought about it, I would have to guess that the problem is my SuperDrive.
That would attain for the slow Windows Installation and the BF2 problems.
I also am having problems importing a CD into iTunes. Seems like enough of a problem to make a visit to the Apple store.

Disk repair and optimization

I would appreciate a bit of advise. Is the disk Utility sufficient for repairing my HD, or can you suggest a good program for repairing and optimising my computer. Disk Warrior is not yet available for OS 10.6.5.
Should i wait for it's introduction, or is there a better app?
Thanks

Optimization and defragging aren't necessary. DiskWarrior 4.2 works with all Snow Leopard versions. The only thing you can't do is boot your machine with the disc it ships on, but you can update it, and copy it to your machine for use. For the rest, see:
Mac Maintenance Quick Assist,
Mac OS X speed FAQ,
Speeding up Macs,
Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
Essential Mac Maintenance: Get set up,
Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines,
Maintaining OS X, and
Myths of required versus not required maintenance for Mac OS X for information.

Time Capsule Hard Drive - Disk Repair and NAT

When the "original item" can't be found on the time capsule hard drive, how does one go about connecting TC to a computer to run a disk utility to repair the TC hard drive? By the way, I was merrily rolling along with TC until this morning. Suddenly, there is a network issue and I can't connect to the internet because of the DHCP range and the hard drive can't be found. Talk about the double whammy!

"because of the DHCP range" means weak signal or interference

Utility disk repair issue and information

I attempted to perform a utility disk repair and these are the details I received. How do I fix these? Why did I attempt a repair you ask? After I log out and select sleep, my machine goes into high fan speed cooling operation and I cannot get out of it unless I unplug the computer.
Many thanks in advance,
Repairing permissions for “Macintosh HD”
Warning: SUID file "usr/libexec/load_hdi" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskManagement.framework/Versions/A/Resources /DiskManagementTool" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DesktopServicesPriv.framework/Versions/A/Reso urces/Locum" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Install.framework/Versions/A/Resources/runner " has been modified and will not be repaired.
Permissions differ on "private/var/log/secure.log", should be -rw------- , they are -rw-r----- .
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Admin.framework/Versions/A/Resources/readconf ig" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Admin.framework/Versions/A/Resources/writecon fig" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "usr/libexec/authopen" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/OwnerGroupTool" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAg ent" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Permissions repair complete

See the following: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306925

Disk Repair and Installation?

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