Comments on: Check Hard Drive Health of a Mac with Disk Utility

By: Matu

Matu — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:51:09 +0000

Hi, will this erase automatically all my data from my hard drive? As I have understood, it doesn’t. Am I right?

Thanks for replying.

By: Bill DuPree

Bill DuPree — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 10:38:53 +0000

Scannerz and Disk Warrior rock. Scannerz finds weak sectors along with bad sectors and can be used to troubleshoot cable and system problems. It’s pure testing but it’s the best. Disk Warrior also rocks because it can reconstruct drive index files on a problematic drive. A few other tools (that I’m not going to name) say they can do the same thing, but I haven’t been impressed with them – kind of like comparing a Yugo to a Ferrari, if you get my drift.

One tool not mentioned is smartmontools – not for the faint of heart and it’s SMART testing, but it’s free and excellent. smartmontools has smartctl which displays the current SMART status of a drive in considerable detail, and smartd which is a daemon process to periodically monitor the SMART status of a drive. It’s an old style app from the Unix/Linux world, ported to OS X that uses a command line interface. There are some graphical user interfaces for it but they may require X-Windows. If you want real SMART monitoring, this is the way to go. Difficult for many, yes, but details beyond anything else.

By: R. K. Orion

R. K. Orion — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:50:33 +0000

The procedure is fine for isolating indexing problems. For people that get indices messed up beyond repair, people have yielded high praise for “Disk Warrior.” Disk Utility won’t find bad sectors, especially if they’re on a region of a drive not used. We use a tool called “Scannerz” for that because it can find a lot of other problems to.

I must clearly be doing something wrong! I’ve been using OS X since its inception back around 2000 and have never needed anything more than disk utility to correct index problems. It DOES need it once in a while, but Disk Utility has always been able to handle them.

It makes me wonder if some apps (that I don’t use) are doing odd things to the drive.

By: Friv

Friv — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 15:42:44 +0000

MacTech, at one point in your life you didn’t know how to verify a disk in osx. The world is always grateful to have been bestowed with a genius like yourself.

By: Nik

Nik — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 04:08:04 +0000

MacTech
You are an A-HOLE i know a hell lot of people that have NO idea how to change a tire LESS that know hoe to do a systems check ion a mac if you are a genius you have to help the people and not tell them you are stupid for something they dont know how to do

By: Daizy

Daizy — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 08:21:58 +0000

Every Mac user should check their Mac hard drive health on regular basis. It helps to prevent you from any disaster of data loss. Disk utility is good one but I have used other one i.e Stellar Drive ToolBox. Drive status module of this software helps to check health of Mac drive with advanced options. Thanks for shairing this information

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 29 May 2012 13:58:04 +0000

Can anyone tell me if this is necessary if I have SMARTReporter installed?

By: Alberto

Alberto — Fri, 25 May 2012 07:12:22 +0000

I never do verify, but always directly repair…

By: bakajiji

bakajiji — Fri, 25 May 2012 07:04:13 +0000

Command + R didn’t work for me. (2010 iMac 27” running Lion). I used the Option key. Disk repair was successful. Thanks for the tip! I wouldn’t have known to do this otherwise.

By: Andy Robinson

Andy Robinson — Fri, 25 May 2012 05:44:21 +0000

this is not in fact “Hard Drive Health” as the health of the actual drive can not be evaluated.

it is actually and more correctly the health of os x’s file system on the primary partition or volume of the hard disk drive (or ssd or flash drive) as opposed to the hdd’s health itself.

By: Carlos Velazquez

Carlos Velazquez — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:36:09 +0000

Recovery HD: For me to Reboot the iMac, need to hold down the Option key.

By: MacTech

MacTech — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:25:40 +0000

It’s amazing to me that so many people don’t know to do this now and then. It should be common knowledge for any Mac user. It should be no different then knowing how to change your tire on your car or checking the oil. But then again, not everyone even knows how to do that… sigh…