Disk utility for system maintenance

With out booting from another disk - Does running repair disk permissions on the home disk do any good?

Does running repair disk permissions on the home disk do any good?
Only if you're currently experiencing trouble. It isn't meant as a routine maintenance task.
(54183)

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How do I access Disk Utility for 10.7.1?

How do I access Disk Utility for 10.7.1? I found it in the forums a few weeks ago, used it, then lost the directions. This is a last ditch attempt
to use OS Lion. I parted my hair incorrectly when I installed and have been plagued by the dread rainbow spinning ball in EVERY application. Yes, every. Name one, Safari, Firefox, Text Edit, Mail, Excel, Word, iTunes, Garage Band, Calculator, Calender, iPhoto....yes, every, and I cannot
find a solution that works. I have back up files on two different hard drives 500 gig and 1 terrabyte with all my music, photo and writing files.
I am a writer and a musician so imagine the frustration. OS 10.6 is an option of course. My dedication to Apple and each new OS is deep so
I am hoping that somehow there will a fix, an upgrade, something that does not require me to go bac to the much more endangered species named OS.
hahhaa! Just stalled waiting for the ball to finish with it's random spinning.... SO, this is like a last desperate .... it just did two more stalls.
NO OTHER apps running, just little Firefox holding on for dear life, last desperate request for a fix.
MacKeeper has been great in sending helpful directions for getting the Antivirus to work after it mysteriously decided to stop working, Quite MacKeeper, go to Activity Monitor, force quit helper, start up MacKeeper and run program. It works!
SO before my third stall stops me, please post directions to open disk utility in administration mode so that I can do any further repairs that have not worked by using it from the open system. Also keychain synching stopped working with Lion.
Thanks to any and all who can help.

Press and hold Command-R keys and reboot. You'll then start up in the Lion Recovery HD. You'll find Disk Utility there.
Command-R to the rescue.
Just hold down Command-R during startup and Lion Recovery springs into action. It lets you choose from common utilities: You can run Disk Utility to check or repair your hard drive, erase your hard drive and reinstall a fresh copy of Lion, or restore your Mac from a Time Machine backup. You can even use Safari to get help from Apple Support online. And if Lion Recovery encounters problems, it will automatically connect to Apple over the Internet.

I upgraded to Mavericks and now some of my utilities --- such as disk utility and system information no longer work.

I upgraded to Mavericks and now some of my utilities --- such as disk utility and system information no longer work. I find Disk Utility useful and would like to have it. Doesn't Makericks include

Boot into your recovery partition (restart, hold down ⌘R until you see the Apple logo), and use Disk Utility to repair your hard drive. Repair permissions too while you're there. OS X: About OS X Recovery
If that doesn't work, I'd reinstall Mavericks over your current installation.

Why am I getting this message on my e-mail account: User account temporarily unavailable for system maintenance

Why am I getting this message on my e-mail account: User account temporarily unavailable for system maintenance?

Is there a solution to this issue? I have an iPhone and an iPad that sync with Outlook using iTunes. Every now and then the contacts, calander and notes become unchecked for both the iPhone and iPad. When I recheck them and "Apply" I get this message: The information on the iPad is synced with another user account. Do you want to sync this iPad with the information from this user account?
As far as U know I have only one User Account. I see that many people have this issue. why isn't there a solution?

Can one PPC Mac run Disk Utility for another's HD?

I have a PPC PowerBook that needs help. The Admin users are getting corrupted for some reason. I can still use other Users in Safe Mode.
I have another good PPC G3 desktop. Both running 10.5.8.
I can mount the bad HD on the good Mac's desktop but I can't run Disk Utility for it.
I've mounted with Ethernet and USB. Do I need Firewire? Do I need do try to use Target Mode?
Basically, I'm trying to use the good Mac as a startup disk for the bad one, I think.
Easy way? Thanks! JP
ps: My hunch is Firewire. I don't have any so I'm going to buy a cable soon. Unless someone here stops me! : )

Yes, you need Target Mode Firewire on both, a FW cable, then Disk Utility should be fine from one to the other.
Target mode...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661
Sometimes Laptops need to have the FW cable unplugged & replugged after they'e in t mode to have it finally show up.

HT2055 Disk Utility for OS X 10.9.2

I need a Disk Utility for OS X 10.9.2 to add disk space to a partition and fix permissions.

You will find Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions - Mavericks, Lion/Mountain Lion
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Repair
When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. 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 then click on the Repair Permissions button. When the process is completed, then quit DU and return to the main menu. Select Restart from the Apple menu.

What is disk utility for?

what is the function of disk utility under application? can someone tell me how to use it?

The hatter wrote:
It is used to format drives, repair permission, and has some ability to repair disk errors, though most go with Disk Warrior.
I think thats a very brief summary of what DU can do, and I'd advise you to check the OSX Help for more DU usages. I'd write that DU can also: repair start-up disk, get info on a disk or volume, create a RAID HD array, SMART-based diagnostic for HD failure, transfer or back-up data as a disk image, burn a CD or DVD, protect info on removable media, see contents on disk image, erase and secure erase a disk/volume... etc
I don't think most Mac users head straight to DW either. I may be guessing but I reckon most simply let their Macs run and run using Leopard with no care at all for file system maintenance. Nonetheless DW is useful third-party utility for some forms of file system repair, though many only bother with it if DU or other means of OS X trouble shooting haven't sorted out the issue first.

What to use for System Maintenance???

There are so many apps for cleaning up your system:
Tiger Cache Cleaner
Ice Clean
Onyx
Cocktail
Maintenance
(maybe more that i haven't heard anything about...?)
can anyone give me a recommendation?
what are the advantages/disadvantages of each?
What do you use? Why?
Any feed back will be appreciated.
Thank you!
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8) 2 GB RAM, 200 GB HDD

Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.0 is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.2 is Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. The current version, 1.5.1, is Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.
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Disk Utility: for bad blocks on hard disks, are seven overwrites any more effective than a single pass of zeros?

In this topic I'm not interested in security or data remanence (for such things we can turn to e.g. Wilders Security Forums).
I'm interested solely in best practice approaches to dealing with bad blocks on hard disks.
I read potentially conflicting information. Examples:
… 7-way write (not just zero all, it does NOT do a reliable safe job mapping out bad blocks) …
— https://discussions.apple.com/message/8191915#8191915 (2008-09-29)
… In theory zero all might find weak or bad blocks but there are better tools …
— https://discussions.apple.com/message/11199777#11199777 (2010-03-09)
… substitution will happen on the first re-write with Zeroes. More passes just takes longer.
— https://discussions.apple.com/message/12414270#12414270 (2010-10-12)
For bad block purposes alone I can't imagine seven overwrites being any more effective than a single pass of zeros.
Please, can anyone elaborate?
Anecdotally, I did find that a Disk Utility single pass of zeros seemed to make good (good enough for a particular purpose) a disk that was previously unreliable (a disk drive that had been dropped).

@MrHoffman
As well pointed your answers are, you are not answering the original question, and regarding consumer device hard drives your answers are missleading.
Consumer device hard drives ONLY remap a bad sector on write. That means regardless how many spare capacity the drive has, it will NEVER remap the sector. That means you ALWAYS have a bad file containing a bad sector.
In other words YOU would throw away an otherwise fully functional drive. That might be reasonable in a big enterprise where it is cheaper to replace the drive and let the RAID system take care of it.
However on an iMac or MacBook (Pro) an ordinary user can not replace the drive himself, so on top of the drive costs he has to pay the repair bill (for a drive that likely STILL is in perfect shape, except for the one 'not yet' remaped bad block)
You simply miss the point that the drive can have still one million good reserve blocks, but will never remap the affected block in a particular email or particular song or particular calendar. So as soon as the file affected is READ the machine hangs, all other processes more or less hang at the same moment they try to perform I/O because the process trying to read the bad block is blocking in the kernal. This happens regardless how many free reserve blocks you have, as the bad block never gets reallocated, unless it is written to it. And your email program wont rewrite an email that is 4 years old for you ... because it is not programmed to realize a certain file needs to be rewritten to get rid of a bad block.
@Graham Perrin
You are similar stubborn in not realizing that your original question is awnsered.
A bad block gets remapped on write.
So obviously it happens at the first write.
How do you come to the strange idea that writing several times makes a difference? How do you come to the strange idea that the bytes you write make a difference? Suppose block 1234 is bad. And the blocks 100,000,000 to 100,000,999 are reserve blocks. When you write '********' to block 1234 the hard drive (firmware) will remap it to e.g. 100,000,101. All subsequent writes will go to the same NEW block. So why do you ask if doing it several times will 'improve' this? After all the awnsers here you should have realized: your question makes no sense as soon as you have understood how remapping works (is supposed to work). And no: it does not matter if you write a sequence od zeros, of '0's or of '1's or of 1s or of your social security number or just 'help me I'm hold prisoner in a software forum'.
I would try to find a software that finds which file is affected, then try to read the bad block until you in fact have read it (that works surprisngly often but may take any time from a few mins to hours) ... in other words you need a software that tries to read the file and copies it completely, so even the bad block is read (hopefully) successful. Then write the whole data to a new file and delete the old one (deleting will free the bad block and ar some later time something will be written there and cause a remap).
Writing zeros into the bad block basically only helps if you don't care that the affected file is corrupted afterwards. E.g. in case of a movie the player might crash after trying to display the affected area. E.g. if you know the affected file is a text file, it would make more sense to write a bunch of '-' signs, as they are readable while zero bytes are not (a text file is not supposed to contain zero bytes)
Hope that helped ;)

Disk Utility: For one Disk it isn't possible to change anything

Good Morning everybody
First I think my Spec's are important:
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012)
2.9 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Two Disks: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250 GB (normal Startup Disk)
Toshiba HDD 750 GB
Intel Hd Graphics 4000 1024 MB
OS X Yosemite Version 10.10.1
And now to the thing I did that the Problem appeared:
After a very long discussion with the Apple Support Help Hotline I decided that, after a Backup, I wil do this: OS X Mountain Lion: Erase and reinstall OS X to try something out, and then will restore my backup.
It all went perfect till the thing with restoring my backup. In the Menu I get when I press (CMD + R) I tried to restore the backup. But then, in the middle of the process, the system cancelled the process automatically and shut down. So I started the Mac again, it automatically came into this CMD + R menu. So I went into the Disk Utility to watch what happened. Since then my two Disks are shown the same way (picture): It is not possible to change anything, except running the First Aid thing. Luckily it was possible to install the OS X and my Backup on the HDD, but for me this is only a temporarily version because the SSD is at the moment completely blocked.
Goal:
It would be great when I can add/remove/change partitions on both Hard Disks and when, at the end, it would be possible to install my Backup to the SSD and use the HDD as a "external Storage" again.
Thanks for all your responses & you can ask me everything if you need more information.
David

This solved my problem.
http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/erasing-a-filevault-2-encrypted-volu me/

Recommendations for system maintenance

I read lots of posts recommending various maintenance tasks to run routinely, but am confused about what should be run to keep the system running as smooth as poss, and what is unnecessary. I have Onyx, and use it to run some tasks, where I've seen recommendations as to their usefulness, but would like to be clearer about what is best.
Can someone please tell me which maintenance is recommended and how often, and which is a waste of time and to leave alone?
Thanks,
Nige

There is nothing recommended, by Apple.
The OS has cleanup routines built-in, that run periodically, +daily, weekly, monthly+.
Besides backing up my computers with Time Machine, I don't do anything at all and have no problems.
If something odd crops up that seems like a permission issue, I will repair permissions with Disk Utility. I haven't seen this very often under Leopard, though.
If it seems there are random behaviors across multiple apps, I will check the disk with Disk Utility. I have never had any disk problems that required something more robust.
In my opinion, knowing how to troubleshoot is better use of your time. Applejack is a utility that somewhat automates the tasks needed. They also have a link to this MacFixIt article on troubleshooting with Applejack. I have used Applejack once, so I can't recommend it, but have seen it recommended in various threads.
The X-Lab has this nice summary on troubleshooting vs. maintenance, Maintaining Mac OS X
Some people will swear by various techniques, but I prefer to use my computer rather than maintain my computer.

Disk Utility Says System RAID Degraded - Does this mean what I think it is?

Hi All
I have a Mirrored RAID Set for my System Drive - being two 931.5 GB Hitachi Drives. This Mirrored RAID Set I have called System RAID. If I click on the RAID Slice in the Disk Utility it says that the "System RAID" is Degraded, and under this [tabbed in] it says 931.2 GB - RAID Slice (disk0s2) Failed with the other under that saying 931.2 GB - RAID Slice (disk1s2) with no comment it has failed [obviously].
So if this essentially means my the first drive in my RAID set has failed then I will lose all data if the second fails also, is this correct?
So what should my next step be? Should I shut down the machine until I can purchase a spare drive to replace the currently damaged one? AND most importantly, HOW do I replace the drive and have it rebuild as the new second drive without erasing / losing data - IE what is the protocol now??
Please your immediate assistance is GREATLY APPRECIATED!
OH and AHH I've just seen in System Profiler that a 2 GB RAM chip appears to have failed
DIMM Riser A/DIMM 4:
Size: 2 GB
Type: DDR2 FB-DIMM
Speed: 800 MHz
Status: ECC Errors
ECC Correctable Errors: 1
Manufacturer: 0x7F61
Part Number: 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000
Serial Number: 0x00000000
What is going on!!

Hi Kappy<
I am trying to migrate user data from a RAID - 1 slice from my old PowerMac G4 running OS X 10.4.11 to my new MacBook Pro running OS X 10.5.4 by reading a mirror RAID slice from my old Mac that is mounted in an external drive enclosure and connected by FireWire.
The problem is that the new Mac cannot read the old Mac disk, it never shows up on the desktop, or comes up as available when trying to use Migration Assistant. Then, if I go into Disk Utility, the external RAID slice shows up briefly with a locked yellow padlock beside it, then I suddenly get the window shade of death, and have to hold down the power button to reset/restart my MacBook.
Why can my new computer not read my old computers disk, and how can I change permissions, or make the old drive readable by the new mac.
Regrettably I am away from the original Desktop, and cannot load the old drive back into it, connect the two machines and migrate that way. My only option for reaching my necessary data is to retrieve it off the drive I have with me.
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Aftermarket Disk Utility for OS 10.4 TIGER

I am trying to find an aftermarket Disk Utility that will be compatable with TIGER 10.4.8. I have Norton but it does not work with OS 10.4, it did work with 10.2.
Can someone respond with a Disk Utility that will work like Norton did? Defrag hard drive, check hard drive for problems & fix. ??????????????
Thanks for any responce.

First, never use Norton Utilities with OS X. It will damage your drive, it's incompatible, and it's no longer made or supported by Symantec.
There are several third-party disk utilities available for doing disk repairs:
1. Disk Warrior (www.alsoft.com)
2. TechTool Pro (www.micromat.com)
3. Drive Genius (www.prosofteng.com)
4. Data Rescue - file recovery only (www.prosofteng.com)
5. File Salvage - file recovery only (www.subrosasoft.com)
And Disk Utility itself is an excellent disk repair program.
There is little need for defragmentation because OS X defrags files less than 20 MBs on the fly.
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Members may reward you with 5 points if they deem that your reply is helpful and 10 points if you post a solution to their issue. Likewise, when you mark a reply as Helpful or Solved in your own created topic, you will be awarding the respondent with the same point values.

Alternative to disk utility for activating firewire disk?

I have two Firewire harddisks, one for TimeMachine and one for my SuperDuper Backups. Because they make noise and slow down Open/Save dialogues, I like to keep them deactivated most of the time.
So far, I've been using disk utility (is that the English name? - I'm on a German system) for activating them. Is there a faster, more elegant solution than opening the disk utility app and activating the drive?
I've searched high and low but only found some AppleScripts that didn't work reliably.
I would appreciate your help.

andreas-kalt wrote:
I tried the solution offered in the thread that you linked to (in fact, I had tried that solution a couple of times before).
Now I have a script like the following:
do shell script "diskutil mount /dev/disk2s2"
However, this does NOT work reliably. Sometimes the disk does become activated, sometimes it doesn't.
this is probably because the device number for the disk may change and the above command is trying to mount the wrong disk.
try this one
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ADD8E6;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
set diskname to "name of your disk"
set devnumber to do shell script "diskutil list |grep " & diskname & " |awk '{print $6}'"
do shell script "diskutil mount " & devnumber</pre>
put the name of your disk in the above

Warning signs when using disk utility for my power mac g5

I have a dual 2GHz PowerPC G5. I just upgraded to the latest Leopard & installed FCP2. I noticed when I use Repair Disk Permissions, there are so many warning signs & I'm not sure what to make of it. I do notice that my computer freezes a lot, can someone help interpret these warning signs for me? And, how do I fix it? Here are some samples of those warning signs during repair disk permissions:
Warning: SUID file "sbin/mount-nfs' has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "sbin/unmount" has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file "sbin/ping' has been modified and will not be repaired
Warning: SUID file "sbin/ping6" has been modified and will not be repaired
Warning: SUID file "sbin/route" has been modified and will not be repaired
The list goes on and on, please help.
many thanks in advance.

The catalog is the index for all the files on disk. It is useless without the related disk files so cloning just the catalog isn't really an option. You would need to clone the entire drive (SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner and even Disk Utility will do this).
Disk Warrior is a utility to clean up the catalog, make it into an order that should speed up file operations. It has potential to loose files because of the nature of it's job, but it is pretty reliable in my opinion. The catalog is like a telephone directory for files
The repairing of permissions involves the system keeping receipts of all the things that are installed & updated (with the appropriate permission values) and then the repair permissions utility resets the files to what the receipts say. The recieots are kept in the /Library/Receipts folder. You haven't deleted anything from there have you? if you have you would need to replace them with copies from a similar system, not an easy task.
I believe the items contained in /sbin/ are system binaries that come from the BSD package when installing Mac OSX. I would consider doing software updates then try repairing the permissions again.

Disk utility for system maintenance

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