A Closer Look at the Capabilities of Disk Utility in Mac OS

One of the topmost concerns of a Mac user is to keep his Mac running in good condition. Things would certainly get worse for you, if no steps are taken towards its periodic or scheduled maintenance. You can choose to be on a safer side by using the Apple's multi-purpose tool called Disk Utility. Disk Utility helps you carry out all the hard disk related tasks, from creation and compression of disk images, to formatting or partitioning disks, to working with your RAID sets. You can also check the integrity of your hard drive and fix issues with Apple's Disk Utility. It verifies your drive for potential problems and presents you with a list of errors. You can use the repair functions of Disk Utility to fix these problems as they are reported by the tool.

These two kinds of problems are becoming a commonplace in the world of Mac computing:

Volume Errors
Volume errors result due to corruption of volume bitmap, volume information, or file directory. These three things are critical to the smooth functioning of Mac. They contain information regarding how files are stored on the drive, the size of each file, and how the documents and applications are accessed. If corruption occurs to these three areas, you will not be able to access files or the operating system may write new files to the memory blocks that are previously allocated. This is also known as directory corruption that can make your Mac malfunction.

Issues with Disk Permissions
Every System-related file or folder has permissions that decide which user can access, modify, or execute these files on your startup disk. Corrupt disk permissions are caused by rogue third-party application installers that change these permissions momentarily, but fail to revert these changes. As a consequence, you may find some icons missing from your desktop or experience Internet connectivity problems. It is good to use 'Repair Disk Permissions' feature of Disk Utility when you are booted from the same drive that you need to repair.

In case Disk Utility cannot perform successful repairs, you should take help of professional Mac data recovery software to get back all your seemingly lost data. Using these software, you can run a comprehensive scan against your OS X drive and recover all files, folders, music, movies and other data absolutely intact. These tools are compatible with the latest Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and all the lower versions.