Friday, January 11, 2013

Steps to Troubleshoot and Tune up Mac

If your Mac is running at snail's pace, applications freeze during normal use, or files display errors upon opening, then it is time to rethink your maintenance plan. These situations cause panic to set in followed by an intense feeling of dissatisfaction. This erratic behavior is often a result of hard drive corruption and other relevant issues on your Mac. In order to keep a track of such problems, you can take a peek into your OS X System Log. If you encounter I/O errors in this log, then you certainly have problems with your drive. You can usually go for the following things to get your Mac out of trouble.

System Log

If you frequently encounter system freezes and application errors, just navigate to your System log and find out all the I/O errors. The System Log can be accessed from the 'Applications/Utilities' folder. You need to select the Console app to get a list of all the recent I/O errors. You may see an error similar to the following in the log:

Jan 22 10:21:13 yourusername kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error

'disk0s2' corresponds to the volume or partition that generated the error.

Repairing the Disk

Mac OS X provides you Disk Utility to identify and correct problems with your troubled disk. You can open Disk Utility from the 'Applications/Utilities' folder. When you select the hard disk, you will see its health status at the bottom of the Disk Utility window. You can verify this disk by selecting the 'First Aid' tab at the top of the window in the right pane, and then clicking the 'Verify Disk' button. If the selected disk has Mac OS X installed on it, you cannot repair the entire disk while being booted from the same. To repair a system partition using Disk Utility, you need to boot from your Mac OS X Install disc.

Backup Your Data

In case you fail to repair the disk using Disk Utility, back up all data to an external drive. Apple's Disk Utility also enables you to clone your hard disk to another disk. To do so, select the 'Restore' tab in the Disk Utility window and drag the source and destination disks to the 'Source' and 'Destination' list boxes respectively in the right pane. You can replace the local disk with the one on which you created the disk clone.

If the problems persist, you can take help of professional software to recover Mac data. These utilities can efficiently scan your hard disk to recover lost or inaccessible files, databases, documents, and other pieces of valuable information.


No comments:

Post a Comment