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This guide shows you how to use Disk Utility on Mac, which is a program that comes with every Mac. Need to make a new folder or change the way an external drive is set up? You don’t have to look for paid partition managers or boot files for disk management. Your Mac has a built-in partition manager and disk management tool called Disk Utility.
You can use Disk Utility even in Recovery Mode, so you don’t have to make and run any special bootable tools to split up your Mac’s hard drive. Disk Utility is a disk manager that comes with every Mac. You can use it to fix, restore, partition, and erase both internal and external storage devices, with or without your Mac booting up. In the old Mac OS, there were two utilities: Disk Utility and Disk Copy. They didn’t become what we know today as Disk Utility until Mac OS X Panther.
How to use Disk Utility on Mac
Find out if your disk is faulty using Disk Utility
You can use the First Aid tool in Disk Utility to check if the drive inside your Mac or an external storage device is broken. The First Aid tool in Disk Utility will check your disk in a number of ways, and if it finds a problem, it will fix it. Keep in mind that you can’t use First Aid to fix your Start Up drive while the operating system is going.
If you want to know more information about this Visit Official Apple Support site. Next, we’ll talk about how to do that. Here’s how to run First Aid on your Mac or an external drive to see if there’s a problem with the disk:
- Open Disk Utility.
- Select your device that you are having problems with from the sidebar. Click on Show All Devices (in the dropdown above View) if you don’t see it.
- Click on First Aid.
- Disk Utility will check the volume for errors and repair it if necessary. Click on Run.
- While Disk Utility checks the volume you won’t be able to use your Mac – beware that it could take a long time.
Repair boot disk/startup disk with Disk Utility
Follow the steps above to run First Aid on your startup drive. If Disk Utility finds any mistakes, it won’t try to fix them. If you need to fix your Mac’s startup drive (the boot volume), you won’t be able to because Disk Utility can’t fix the mounted volume (the one that everything is working from).
In this case, you need to start up your Mac in Recovery Mode and fix the disk from there. So, things can run from the Recovery HD volume that was made when macOS was loaded. How you get to Recovery depends on what kind of Mac you have:
- If you have an M1-series Mac then shut down the Mac, then press and hold down the power button as it boots.
- If you have an Intel Mac restart your Mac and hold down Command-R on the keyboard.
To repair your startup disk:
- Start up in Recovery by following the steps above.
- Once your Mac has booted up in Recovery you will see a Utilities screen. Choose Disk Utility.
- Select the disk you wish to repair from the menu and clink on First Aid.
- As above, Disk Utility will run its checks and try and repair if it can.
Format a disk using Disk Utility
You might want to format a drive for more than one reason. You might want to wipe your startup drive so you can reinstall OS X, you might want to secure an external storage drive you use for work, or you might want to make a partition for Windows or a different version of the Mac operating system. There are different types of file forms you might want to use, such as:
- Apple File System (APFS) – Apple’s filing system since macOS.
- Mac OS Extended – Apple’s filing system prior to macOS.
- and MS-DOS (FAT) and ExFAT – for compatibility with Windows.
What Is Disk Utility?
Disk Utility is the hub for all drive management tools in macOS. It lets you view, diagnose, partition, and format any internal or external drive attached to your Mac. The tool also shows different details and a graph of how your hard drives are set up. This lets you quickly look at the total capacity and the amount of free and used room on any drive.
Also, if you add an external drive to your Mac and it doesn’t show up in macOS, you can use Disk Utility to look at the drive and figure out why it’s not working right. Disk Utility has changed a few times over the years in different versions of macOS. This means that the options you see on screen may be slightly different based on the version of macOS your computer is running.