Your Mac hard drive was behaving differently. You may hear a screeching sound, some files seem to be corrupted or missing, and the system is extremely slow. All these symptoms indicate a bad condition of your hard drive, which could eventually lead to data loss or system crash. Several moving parts of a hard drive are known to degrade over the years, and sometimes even the magnetic sectors may not work efficiently. Before any data loss or other problems occur, you need to be able to recognize the symptoms. There are several ways to identify this, but you can easily do so using Apple’s built-in Disk Utility. This post guides you through the steps to use this feature and tips for repairing your hard drive using two other built-in features macOS Recovery Mode and Single User Mode.
Steps to verify the health of a drive using Disk Utility
- Go to Applications >> Utilities Folder >> Disk Utility.
- Then in Disk Utility, click on the menu View >> Show All Devices.
- On the left, you’ll see a list of all the storage devices on your Mac. The first device listed will be your Mac’s boot drive. You can click on the arrow that appears to the left of the label. This will expand the list and you will be able to see the containers and volumes on the drive.
- Select the last item on the drive.
- Click on the First Aid tab.
- You will see the message “ Start First Aid on “Macintosh HD Data”, press Start if you want to continue. The message also says “First Aid will check the volume for errors. It will then adjust the volume if necessary.
- This process may take some time.
- In case you see a dimmed Run Drive, you may not be able to operate this function on the drive. Press Cancel.
- Go to the left column, repeat step 6. You can repeat this until you have checked all the drives in that list.
First aid will bring you health driving results. If you see messages in black, it means things are fine. If the messages appear in red, the drive requires repair. You will see several messages like this:
- Checking the partition map for “APPLE Media”
- Checking prerequisites
- Checking the EFI system partition
- Checking the partition list
- Checking the size of the EFI system partition
- Checking all the load spaces of the HFS data partition
- Checking the file system of the EFI system partition
- Verifying Core Storage Physical Volume partitions
- The partition map seems to be fine
If you see a message that the disk needs to be repaired, you can click the Repair disk button. If the disk in question is a startup disk, then this option may not be displayed. However, this does not mean that you cannot repair the drive. You can easily do this, however there will be an extra step involved.
How to use Disk Utility to repair a hard drive
You can boot the hard drive in all advanced systems like High Sierra, macOS Sierra, OS X Lion, Yosemite, OS X Mavericks and so on.
- Restart the system and hold Command + R. Many systems have a retention option. You can hold it until you see a spinning globe or the Apple logo on the screen.
- Go to boot menu and select “Recovery HD”.
- Select “Disk Utility” from the Mac Utilities screen.
- Click on the hard drive where the error is reported.
- Click the tab – First Aid >>Disk Repair.
- After this repair is done, you will be able to start the system normally and the drive problems will be solved.
How to repair hard drive using Single User Mode?
You can restart your Mac in single-user mode to repair the hard drive by following these steps.
- Back up your files and shut down your computer.
- Then press and hold Command + S to start single-user mode.
- Once the mode is active, you will see white text on a black screen. This boot will take some time.
- When finished, each line will appear with “localhost//”.
- Type the fsck-fy command and press Return, disk check messages will appear on the screen.
- When the process completes, you can check the message that reads “The volume seems to be fine”. If you don’t see this message, you can repeat this process until you see it.
- When you see the message, type Reboot and press Return, then you will exit single user mode.
- When the system boots, you can boot the drive through Disk Utility to make sure the drive is working properly.
If the above steps do not work and the hard drive is damaged beyond repair, you must contact your nearest Apple store. In case you can’t get to the nearest store or find a certified technician, you can still recover data from crashed Mac Drive using professional data recovery software for Mac such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac. This software recovers data from a crashed or unbootable Mac using a recovery drive. It supports the latest macOS Big Sur and other older versions. It can recover all types of files including photos, audio, videos and more. You can download a free trial version of the software to evaluate its performance before purchasing the premium version.
Also Read: Recover Deleted Files from External Hard Drive on Mac
More Author: L. Dias William Software and applications, Apple, Mac, iOS and gadgets
Categories: How to
Source: HIS Education