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.

Similar Messages

  • 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.

  • 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, what is used for?

    What is disk utlity, & what it used for?

    It is used for a variety of things, including disk repair (if the data structures that keep track of data on the disk get corrupted), repair of permissions on the system files if they get messed up, erasing and partitioning disks, etc.  As Linc points out, Disk Utility's help can give you all the details.  Note that some things cannot be done to the system drive unless you start up from a different drive.
    Also, note that if you're asking because you're deleting apps that you don't use, you really shouldn't do that with the preinstalled Apple apps, even if you think you don't have a use for them.  Sometimes deleting them can have unexpected side effects, and you never know when you might need such an app.

  • What disk utility for Maverick

    I have a MacBook Pro that I've upgraded to Maverick (10.9.5) It came with Snow Leopard; has Intel processor and 4 GB memory. It seems to be running more slowly maybe since I installed Maverick. I'd like to run a disk utility but the one that came with the machine won't work, "You can't use this version of the application"install Mac OS X" with this version of OS X. Your have 'install Mac OS X' 23.1.1"
    What disk utility can I use. I have DiskWarrior 4 but don't know if it will work.

    I'm not sure what "install Mac OS X" has to do with Disk Utility.
    Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions - Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion or 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.

  • 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/

  • No gui option in disk utility for new hdd in white unibody mbp

    Hello,
    i replaced the harddisk in my white unibody macbook with an
    Samsung Spinpoint M9T 1TB HDD out of a seagate backup portable drive.
    disk utility can erase it, and partition it, but it does not show the option to create a GUI partition.
    restoring from time machine backup does not work
    installer for leopard, from the original dvd states that it needs that.
    what can i do?
    hope to hear from you.
    ps:
    on my imac and my mbp the bootable disk is mac os extended(journaled)
    so no 'gui-partition' there

    Aha! I only looked at 'format' list, didn't notice the 'option' list.
    problem solved.
    thank you !

  • Is Drive Genius the best disk utility for Mac?

    I just wanted to see if any one had an opinion on Drive Genius? I have one computer that is brand new (Imac) and a Powerbook that is a bit old. I want to keep them both running in tip-top shape.

    I've not used Drive Genius and cannot comment on that program but I have used Disk Warrior and Tech Tools Pro and Data Rescue. All three have fixed me up but if I had to choose just one of these it would be Tech Tools Pro because DW is a one-trick pony for the price and I think that Tech Tools Pro can now do what Data Rescue can do. I just didn't have it when I used Data Rescue but the app seems to have caught up doing what the other two can do. More for your money!
    BTW: I didn't buy Drive Genius because when I decided on buying Disk Warrior I read some negatives about it. Things like additional corruption caused by running it and inabilities to fix things that seemed like Disk Utility could easily resolve. That was a few years ago so hopefully they fixed some of the failures it had that seemed as valid issues at the time.
    Message was edited by: David Farah

  • What does disk utility really do ?

    I downloaded a lion 10.8 dmg from internet and wanted to make a installation portable disk.
    And when I loaded the dmg, and used the 'disk utility' to restore installation files to one of my disk partitions, it just failed. And what is real annoying is that I got my disk partitions after the partition lost. And I can't get my important files back.
    Maybe the 'disk utility' want to change the partition to be bootable and made the partition tables damaged.
    Hope someone can help me to repair the disk and make the disk utility more secure !

    varjak paw wrote:
    There is no DMG of Lion, at least not anything legal. From where did you get this file?
    Well there is a DMG of both Lion and Mt Lion. But it is included in the Lion/Mt Lion OS X Install.app package files and can be copied out.
    But that is Not the Operating System. It is the Install files for the operating system. Restoring that DMG would, supposedly, give you bootable media for installing the OS on a drive.
    To the OP I have found that the Restore feature/function in Disk Utility doesn't always work as expected. Best thing to do is use this program for creating a Dual Layer DVD or USB thumb of the Mt Lion install files. It works every time.
    Make the USB thumb as most of the, Not So, Superdrives can't really write to Dual Layer DVDs. You will be very lucky if you have a Superdrive that will actually write to Dual Layer DVDs.

  • What does Disk Utility mean by saying the back up disk cannot be unmounted?

    Disk utility has been giving me that error and I get about the same message when Time Machine attempts to do a back up as well. What does it mean?

    Hi! When you try to do a repair on a disk it "unmounts" (removes it from the desktop) (which locks the directory) so it can be repaired. Unmounting also is required for an erase. Time Machine shouldn't be trying to unmount it for a backup in fact it could write to it if it unmounts. Tom

  • Disk utility for Snow Leopard

    Found a "corrupt file" on console for Java.
    In an effort to fix the problem, tried Disk Utility. Got message "cannot use this version with your OS" (Snow Leopard).
    So - cannot use Java.
    Cannot use Disk Utility.
    What now"

    OK
    First try opening it from it's default location - Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
    DU should have been updated as part of the 10.6.3 install, so if it still doesn't work, try running the 10.6.8 combo update.
    If that fails, you may need to boot from the Snow Leopard install disc and run DU from there -
    Boot from your  installer DVD (hold down the C key on startup or hold down Alt/option on start and choose the installer disc).
    OK the language page. From the installer screen, go to the menu bar and choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Do not click 'continue'
    In DU, select your internal drive in the sidebar (the top item with the makers name and serial no.). Run Repair Disk.
    If that comes up as disk OK,
    close DU and quit the installer - restart when the little box prompts you.
    Try DU from the Utilities folder again.
    If it still won't work, you may need to reinstall Snow Leopard to get a clean copy.

  • 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.

  • Using Disk Utility for Boot Camp to work

    I'm trying to install Windows 7, but Boot Camp gave me the old error message about having unmovable data and needed to use Disk Utility to format it as a Single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Volume. So I backed everything up and am ready to go, but when I open Disk Utility and select my hard drive/disk, all the options under "erase" are grayed out. Any ideas?
    Thanks!

    You can't format what you are using.
    If you cloned your drive you would be able to boot from that; if you used another method and you don't have OS X installed on another hard drive, you have to use your DVD.

  • 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 ;)

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