The main difference is selecting a drive, not a volume, from the list of devices. Disk Utility will unmount the volume from the desktop, erase it, and then remount it on the desktop.įormatting a drive is essentially the same as erasing it.

Make your selection and click the Erase button. But the utility can only create the Recovery HD volume on an external drive, so users who may have multiple internal hard drives on Mac Pro, iMac, and Mac Mini are not covered. We can prepare you for any worst-case scenarios by making a copy of the recovery disk to use it to fix and restore your drive should it quit on you.Īpple created a utility called Recovery Disk Assistant that creates a copy of the Recovery HD on any bootable external drive that’s connected to a Mac. It contains useful tools to recover data, but it’s no good if you can’t get to it. If the worst happens and a Mac crashes and won’t start, what do you do? The Recovery disk is a secret partition that is part of the Recovery system. But it’s no substitute for having a good backup strategy. Repair Disk is great at making minor disk repairs to a volume’s file system and a drive’s directory structure. bom file to verify and repair permission issues.ĭisk Utility’s First Aid feature can help repair a hard drive or file and folder permissions. It includes a Bill of Materials (.bom) file that lists all the files installed and what their permissions are set to.

When an application or group of files is installed, permissions are defined for each item in the file system according to whether it can be read, written to, or executed. Disk Utility erases, formats, partitions, and works with disk images, as well as repairs drives with various issues like startup fails and freezes.ĭisk Utility’s Repair Disk Permissions is designed to restore file or folder permissions to the state the OS expect them to be in. It’s the first line of defense when it comes to verifying whether a drive is working correctly. Nerds on Call follows this list of Mac tuneup tips to help keep your Mac running like the top-notch system it is: Repair hard drives and disk permissionsĭisk Utility works with Mac’s storage devices, including hard drives, SSDs, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, and more.

The Disk Utility app still remains useful to most versions of the Mac operating system. While Apple has made a few changes to Disk Utility after the release of OS X El Capitan, it mainly removed features that are no longer needed, due to the way OS X and macOS have changed over time. The ability to add, delete, and resize hard drive partitions without first erasing the hard drive, makes tuning up your Mac with Disk Utility essential for system maintenance purposes. Disk Utility is the go-to app to take care of maintenance and disk needs on a Mac.

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