Whether you need to better organize your hard parkway or resolve disc mistake , Disk Utility is the tool for the job . build into macOS , Disk Utility is tuck away in the Utilities brochure , which is find inside the Applications leaflet , but is easy to settle using Spotlight – which you trigger by pressing Command+Space Bar and then just typewrite Disk Utility .
The instrument displays details and a graph of your hard drive configuration , showing the overall capacitance as well as the used and free space and the various bulk .
Over the old age Disk Utility has been overhauled a few time , so the option may be slightly unlike depend on the version of macOS you are using . For exemplar , in Mac OS X El Capitan Disk Utility was redesigned and many of the features evolved or were removed . There were also a few changes in macOS High Sierra thanks to the young file format Apple enter : APFS . And when Catalina arrived a new Macintosh HD – Data loudness start showing alongside a read - only Macintosh HD system bulk .
Why use Disk Utility
you may use Disk Utility to do the following :
You might want to practice Disk Utility it if you experience the following :
Below we will function through how to perform the most vernacular Disk Utility job .
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How to find out if your disk is faulty using Disk Utility
If you think there is a problem with the drive inside your Mac or an outside entrepot machine , you’re able to expend the First Aid feature in Disk Utility to break .
The First Aid feature article in Disk Utility will run various hitch and if it detects an issue with your disk it will repair it .
Note that you may ca n’t use First Aid to fix your begin Up movement while it is start the manoeuver organization . We ’ll run through how to do that next .
Here ’s how to run First Aid on your Mac or on an external drive to verify if there is a trouble with the magnetic disc :
If it finds a trouble with the disk , Disk Utility will attempt to repair it .
If Disk Utility is ineffectual to recompense the drive , or it believes that the disk is about to fail it will warn you . Should this be the case you should back up your data before it ’s too recent . take this article onbacking up your Mac . You may also find this useful : How to recover and delete data from a failed severe drive , SSD or international drive .
If Disk Utility reports that the saucer is OK that means there is n’t a trouble with the record .
How to repair your boot disk/startup disk with Disk Utility
you’re able to run First Aid on your startup crusade following the steps above , but if Disk Utility finds any fault it wo n’t attempt to fix them .
If you demand to repair your Mac ’s inauguration driving ( the boot volume ) you wo n’t be able-bodied to as Disk Utility ca n’t remediate the mounted volume ( the one that everything is running from ) .
In this lawsuit you require to start up your Mac in Recovery Mode and repair the disc from there . This way things can run from the Recovery HD loudness that was make when macOS was installed .
The method acting for accessing Recovery reckon on your macintosh :
We have adetailed tutorial on using Recovery Mode here .
To recreate your startup disc :
The repair process may take a while .
For more information readHow to verify your Mac ’s drive health using Disk Utility .
How to format a disk using Disk Utility
There are a number of reasons why you might require to initialise a campaign . Perhaps you want to pass over your inauguration drive so you could perform a fresh install of OS X , mayhap you want to encrypt an external memory board drive that you use for work , or you might wish to create a partition for Windows or a unlike edition of the Mac operating scheme .
There are various file formats that you might want to use including :
We have a gradation by stepguide to format a drive on the Mac here .
When you are arrange a private road you may also add encryption and other surety features .
How to use Disk Utility when a drive won’t mount
If you plug away a hard drive or flash drive in to your Mac and does n’t see it and wo n’t let you get to the data point read : What to do if a hard cause wo n’t mount .
How to create a Disk Image using Disk Utility
Disk Utility is able-bodied to produce a disk figure of speech of subject of a folder which you’re able to then transfer to another Mac , an archive , or any location that does n’t accept folders .
It ’s similar to compressing the folder into a zip archive , but the welfare is that you could not only use saucer image compression to save space , but can also take reward of Apple ’s encoding for the disk effigy .
How to partition a disk or create a volume
You may wish to partition off a disk to divide it into separate container or because you need to set up multiple operating systems . How you do this will depend on the translation of macOS you are running . On newer Macs rather than create a partition you should create a bulk .
show ourguide to how to zone a Mac .
