Fixing Disk Problems

It's not unusual for a hard drive to experience problems. When problems occur on the main hard drive, it can produce lock ups and slower performance. Apple helps to solve this problem by letting you perform disk repairs to any drives with the exception of the start up drive. For example, you could use disk repair to fix problems on a damaged JAZZ drive, or a secondary hard drive. Apple's Disk Utility locates and fixes problems with catalog and storage files. When information in these areas is damaged, it can cause trouble opening files and slowing down performance.

Fix Disk Problems

Open the Applications folder, double-click the Utilities folder, and then double-click the Disk Utility icon.

Click the First Aid tab.

Select a non-startup volume (you cannot repair the startup drive).

Click Repair Disk.

IMPORTANT You cannot repair the Startup volume. To perform a Repair Disk on the Startup volume, you'll have to reboot from a different disk.

Repeat steps 3 and 4 until all your disks have been repaired.

TIMESAVER Applications such as Norton Utilities and Tech Tools can help to further enhance and optimize your hard drives, by performing a defrag, or by performing error checks to files not available with the Apple Disk Utility.