Manual Disk Utility In Mac

11-05-2021 admin

Disk Utility In Mac Os
Manual Disk Utility In Mac Download
Disk Utility Mac Download
Manual Disk Utility In Mac Os Lion

RELATED: How, When, and Why to Repair Disk Permissions on Your Mac. If a hard drive is acting up, Disk Utility’s First Aid function is the first thing you should try. This feature checks the file system for errors and attempts to correct them, all without much intervention from you. How to check your startup disk with Disk Utility in macOS Recovery mode. The first thing you'll want to do is make sure your Mac's startup disk is healthy. You'll need to use Disk Utility to do that. Click Disk Utility when in macOS Recovery. Click Continue. Click on your Mac's startup drive in the Disk Utility sidebar. It should be the drive. Jul 30, 2017 Select Disk Utility and click on the Continue button. When Disk Utility loads select the drive (usually, the out-dented entry) from the side list. Click on the Erase tab in Disk Utility's main window. A panel will drop down. Set the partition scheme to GUID. Set the Format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.). Manual formatting—Use Disk Management (Windows) or Disk Utility (Mac) to format your drive in non-native formats. About file system formats. NTFS—The native file system for Windows. MacOS can read NTFS volumes but cannot natively write to them. Mac OS Extended (HFS+)—The native hard drive file system for macOS. Windows cannot natively.

Need to create a new partition, or re-format an external drive? There’s no need to hunt down paid partition managers or disk-management boot disks: your Mac includes a built-in partition manager and disk management tool known as Disk Utility.

Disk Utility is even accessible from Recovery Mode, so you can partition your Mac’s hard drive without having to create and load up any special bootable tools.

Accessing Disk Utility

RELATED:How to Use macOS’ Spotlight Like a Champ

To access the Disk Utility in macOS, just press Command+Space to open Spotlight search, type “Disk Utility” into the search box, and then press Enter. You can also click the Launchpad icon on your dock, click the Other folder, and then click Disk Utility. Or, open a Finder window, click Applications in the sidebar, double-click the Utilities folder, and then double-click Disk Utility.

RELATED:8 Mac System Features You Can Access in Recovery Mode

Disk Utility In Mac Os

To access the Disk Utility on a modern Mac—regardless of whether it even has an operating system installed—reboot or boot up the Mac and hold Command+R as it boots. It’ll boot into Recovery Mode, and you can click Disk Utility to open it up.

In Recovery Mode, macOS runs a special sort of recovery environment. This allows you to use Disk Utility to wipe your entire drive—or repartition it.

Partition Drives and Format Partitions

Disk Utility shows internal drives and connected external drives (like USB drives), as well as special image files (DMG files) that you can mount and access as drives.

On the left side of the window you’ll see all mounted volumes.

RELATED:How to Show Empty, Unformatted Drives in Disk Utility on macOS

This annoyingly leaves out empty hard drives, but click Views > Show All Devices in the menu bar and you’ll see a tree of drives and their internal partitions. Each “parent” drive is a separate physical drive, while each little drive icon below it is a partition on that drive.

To manage your partitions, click a parent drive and select the “Partition” heading. You can adjust the partitioning layout scheme here. You can also resize, delete, create, rename, and reformat partitions.

Note: Many of these operations are destructive, so be sure you have backups first.

RELATED:APFS Explained: What You Need to Know About Apple’s New File System

If you want to repartition your system drive, you’ll need to do this from within Recovery Mode, with one exception: APFS volumes. APFS is Apple’s new file system, the default on solid state drives as of macOS High Sierra, and it’s got all sorts of clever tricks up its sleeve. One of them: volumes on the same drive pool storage space, meaning you’ll see two separate drives in Finder, but won’t have to manage how much storage space each volume uses. To add a new APFS volume, simply select your system drive, and then click Edit > Add APFS in the menu bar. You’ll see the above prompt.

First Aid Repairs File System Problems

RELATED:How, When, and Why to Repair Disk Permissions on Your Mac

If a hard drive is acting up, Disk Utility’s First Aid function is the first thing you should try. This feature checks the file system for errors and attempts to correct them, all without much intervention from you.

Simply click the drive you want to check, then click the “First Aid” button. Be warned that these checks can take a while, and running them on your system drive will leave you with an unresponsive computer until it’s done.

Secure-Erase a Partition or Drive

The Erase button allows you to erase an entire hard disk or partition. You can also choose to only erase its free space.

You can use this feature to securely wipe a hard drive. Click a drive, then click the “Erase” button, then click “Security Options” to select a number of passes to overwrite the drive with. One pass should be good enough, but you can always do a few more if you feel like it. The maximum number is unnecessary.

Note that this feature will only be useful on mechanical drives, as you shouldn’t be able to recover deleted data from a solid state drive. Don’t perform a secure erase on a solid-state drive, such as the ones built into modern Mac Books—that will just wear down the drive for no advantage. Performing the “fastest” erase of the internal drive from recovery mode will erase everything.

Create and Work With Disk Images

RELATED:How to Create an Encrypted Disk Image to Securely Store Sensitive Files on a Mac

Click the File menu in Disk Utility and use the New menu to create blank disk images or disk images containing the contents of a folder — these are .DMG files. You can then mount that disk image file and write files into it. This is particularly useful because you can encrypt that DMG file, creating an encrypted container file that can store other files. You can then upload this encrypted DMG file to cloud storage locations or save it on unencrypted removable drives.

The Convert and Resize Image buttons will allow you to manage that disk image from the Disk Utility window.

Copy Volumes and Restore Disk Images

The Restore feature allows you to copy one volume to another. You can use it to copy the contents of one partition to another, or to copy a disk image to a partition.

You can also create a disk image that contains an exact copy of an entire partition. Select the drive you’d like to create an image of, and then click File > New Image > Image From [Partition Name].

You can later restore this disk image file to a partition, erasing that partition and copying the data from the disk image to it.

RAID Setup

RELATED:How to Use Multiple Disks Intelligently: An Introduction to RAID

Manual Disk Utility In Mac Download

The Disk Utility also allows you to set up RAID on a Mac: just click File > RAID Assistant in the menu bar. Combine disks and partitions into one or more RAID sets and choose whether you want to mirror, stripe, or concatenate your data. This is an advanced feature most people won’t need to use, but it’s there if you need it.

Disk Utility Mac Download

Mirroring (RAID 1) means data you write to the RIAD is stored on each partition or drive for failsafe purposes. If one drive dies, your data is still available elsewhere.

Manual Disk Utility In Mac Os Lion

Striping (RAID 0) will alternate disk writes between one drive and the other for faster speed. However, if one of the drives fails, you’ll lose all the data — so it’s getting more speed at the expense of less reliability.

Concatenation (JBOD) allows you to combine different drives as though they were one, useful in certain circumstances.

RELATED:Understanding Hard Drive Partitioning with Disk Management

The Disk Utility included with Mac OS X is powerful, and it should handle all the functions you need it to perform. It’s a bit like the Disk Management tool built into Windows, but more capable and, thanks to Recovery Mode, easier to access from outside the operating system.

Photo credit: Joe Besure/Shutterstock.com

Ninislam