Aug 11 2008

How to Repair Disk (and Disk Permissions) in OS X

Published by georgegumpert at 12:31 pm under Mac ()

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So Just a quick little note on a quick and easy fix for if your mac is behaving sluggish or just misbehaving in general.  So many of us mac switchers are used to not having to perform any system maintenance (Goodbye, defrag!), but there are other issues we have to face, primarily involving disk permissions.  Here’s how to repair them.

  1. Open Disk Utility (Spotlight/Quicksilver: Disk Utility, or Applications->Utilities->Disk Utility)
  2. Select “Macintosh HD”
  3. Click “Verify Disk Permissions”  It will take a while to verify, but once it’s done it may come up with a whole list of permission errors.
  4. Click “Repair Disk Permissions.”  This again will take a while.
  5. Repeat the same for “Verify Disk” and “Repair Disk”

So why do we have to do this from time to time?  The simple answer is that OS X expects certain files to have certain permissions (in other words, for a user or process to be allowed to access the file).  If reality differs from what OS X expects, any number of issues can be the result: printers not working, applications not opening, or even being unable to login.

Nine times out of ten, repairing disk permissions will fix your problem.

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3 Responses to “How to Repair Disk (and Disk Permissions) in OS X”

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