Disk utility Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Ailing Mac? Try Drive Genius 3

by Ilene Hoffman (May 24th, 2013)

When your Mac starts acting unreliably your first line of defense is Apple's Disk Utility, but that solves a small number of problems, such as permissions and disk verification and repair. A good second line of defense is Drive Genius 3 for Mac from Prosoft Engineering. Drive Genius offers repair ...

Finding Steve's recovery partition: Solving an Apple mystery

by Erica Sadun (Feb 13th, 2013)

Yesterday, fellow blogger Steve Sande hopped into the TUAW backchannel all fussed. As part of some iMovie troubleshooting he was doing with Apple's support wizards, he was trying to get his new iMac to boot into the recovery partition and was getting nowhere. Holding down the Option key during ...

Dear Aunt TUAW: What is the lifespan of a large-capacity hard drive?

by Erica Sadun (Oct 28th, 2011)

Dear Aunt TUAW, So here's the deal. There are 8-terabyte drives on the market now which, unless you are working for a production company or shooting buckets of RAW, you are never going to use. That's just extra space, which is great! Except, what is the lifespan of those drives? Will they ...

Find My Mac not working for you? You're not alone

by Michael Jones (Oct 17th, 2011)

If you're having trouble getting Lion to let you enable Find My Mac, you're not the only one. It seems at least a few people are running into a problem where they see the above message in the iCloud preference pane, but clicking the update button (or running System Update manually) yields no ...

Build a better Lion installer

by TJ Luoma (Aug 22nd, 2011)

Apple now offers a US$69 USB installer for Lion. It comes on one of those tiny white USB sticks we first saw with the MacBook Air. I have not used one of the Lion installers, but I have one that came with my MacBook Air: it's only 8 GB, and (this is the really disappointing part) it is not ...

Apple sued over Disk Utility patent

by Kelly Hodgkins (Aug 18th, 2011)

The words "Apple" and "lawsuit" have nearly become synonymous lately, as companies crawl out of the woodworks to sue the Cupertino company. On August 17, 2011, Software Restore Solutions filed a complaint against Apple in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The ...

Dev Juice: Help me recover my beta partition

by Erica Sadun (Jul 18th, 2011)

Dear Dev Juice, I was in the Lion beta program. Now that 10.7 is about to release I want to reclaim the small partition I added to my laptop that I was using to test it. How do I do this? Shawn Dear Shawn, Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) makes it easy to recover ...

Disk Drill protects your Mac disks, recovers files

by Steven Sande (Mar 8th, 2011)

Many of the disk utilities available for Mac OS X have been around for quite a few years, so it's surprising when a new entry shows up in this very important class of Mac app. The latest entry, Disk Drill from Cleverfiles, comes in four different flavors ranging from a free Basic edition that may ...

Ask TUAW: File ownership and permissions, converting FLV and OGG, extra displays, and more

by Mat Lu (Mar 5th, 2010)

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about changing file ownership and permissions, adding two external displays to a MacBook Pro, converting OGG and FLV files on an older Mac, transferring a Time Machine backup to a new disk, and more. ...

Ask TUAW: Prepping a Mac for transfer, adding words to spell check, updating Boot Camp, and more

by Mat Lu (Jan 28th, 2010)

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about preparing a Mac that you're transferring to a new owner, updating Boot Camp, adding words to the built-in spell check, dealing with flaky network disks, FTP clients, and more. As always, your ...

Ask TUAW: Automatic file sorting, Disk Utility, iPod battery replacement, and more

by Mat Lu (Jan 20th, 2010)

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about automatically sorting downloaded files, using Disk Utility to change partitions and format external drives, using a KVM in a multi-platform environment, replacing an iPod touch battery, and more. ...

Why is there a progress bar when my Mac is starting up?

by Josh Carr (Dec 16th, 2009)

Update: As several of our commenters pointed out, the OS is probably running the fsck utility in the background to repair directory problems, while showing the progress bar to the end user so they know there's something going on (fsck can take quite a while). Here's an older Apple support article ...

Backup or copy your iDVD home movies

by Aron Trimble (Dec 3rd, 2009)

If you've ever used iDVD to burn your own home movies then chances are pretty good that you've had a family member request a copy. And since your iDVDs are yours to share and duplicate, then you are more than happy to pull up the project and whip out another copy. Lo and behold, as fate would ...

TUAW Tip: Wipe down an old Mac with Target Disk Mode

by Cory Bohon (Apr 27th, 2009)

A reader recently contacted us with a question regarding her decision to recycle an older iMac computer. She wanted to know how she could clear/reformat the hard drive, but didn't have the disks that came with the system. So, we thought we would take a minute to tell you how you can cleanse your ...

Time Capsule disk corruption issues? Base station firmware may fix it

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Mar 20th, 2009)

If you've been having issues with corrupted Time Machine images either inside the Time Capsule or connected externally to your base station, the 7.4.1 firmware update (for all base stations from 2007 to today) plus the 10.5.6 update might help, according to TidBITS. Apple says this update will fix ...