Disk Utility Maitenance

Article, Disk Utility, Intermediate, Mac OS X | April 8th, 2008

Sometimes you’ll find that your Mac is having issues. Things are slow, you may see the infamous spinning rainbow beach ball, or perhaps your getting messages about permissions. When things are acting funky you can try using Disk Utility to fix your Mac.

There’s no gurrantee that Disk Utility is going to perfectly fix your issues, however it has been known to help here and there. Before you dive to deep in to fixing your issues, try these steps below.

1. Launch Disk Utility. This can be found under Applications > Utilities.
2. Select your hard drive from the left column. Under the First Aid tab click the Verify Disk button. This will take a couple minutes.
3. Once this is done you’ll either be instructed to click the Repair Disk button if an issue is found or you’ll be informed that everything is alright. In my case, everything passed.
4. The next series of tests you can run are to do with your permissions. Select a Partition (Most like Macintosh HD) and click the Verify Disk Permissions button.
5. This may take awhile longer. Once this is done, if your system reports issues, click the Repair Disk Permissions button. Keep in mind, repairing disk permissions in Disk Utility will only repair permissions on Mac OS X system files. This means any personal files or 3rd party applications you have installed will not be verified or repaired during this process.
6. Once the repair process is done you will be informed of the changes and you can browse through the repair log.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, there is no guarantee that these steps will fix your issues. However, this is a great first step in the process. If you continue to have issues, you may want to consider taking your machine to an authorized service provider. Good luck!