How to Check Mac Hard Drive Health Using Disk Utility?

Your Mac hard drive has been acting differently. You may hear some screeching noises, some files appear to be corrupted or missing, and the system is extremely slow. All these symptoms indicate poor health of your hard drive, which would eventually lead to data loss or system crash. Various moving parts of a hard drive are known to degrade over the years, and sometimes even the magnetic sectors may not function efficiently. Before any kind of data loss or other problems occur, you need to be able to identify the symptoms. There are several ways to identify this, but you can easily do this using Apple’s built-in Disk Utility tool. This post walks you through the steps to use this feature and tips to repair your hard drive using two other built-in features, macOS Recovery Mode and Single User Mode.

1. Go to Applications >> Utilities Folder >> Disk Utility.
2. Then in Disk Utility, click View menu >> Show All Devices.
3. You will see a list of all the storage devices on your Mac on the left side. The first device listed will be your Mac’s startup drive. You can click the arrow that appears on the left side of the label. This will expand the list and you will be able to see containers and volumes on the drive.
4. Pick the last item in the drive.
5. Click the First Aid tab.
6. You will see a message “Run First Aid on “Macintosh HD Data”, press Run if you want to continue. The message also says “First Aid will check the volume for errors. It will then repair the volume if necessary.
7. This process may take some time.
8. In case you see a grayed out Run Drive, you may not be able to operate this function on the drive. Click Cancel.
9. Go to the left column, repeat step 6. You can repeat this until you check all the drives in that list.

First Aid will bring you the results of the health of the disk. If you see the messages in black, it indicates that things are fine. If the messages appear in red, then the drive requires service.

You will see several messages like this:

• Checking partition map for “APPLE Media”

• Prerequisite check
• Checking an EFI system partition
• Checking the partition list
• Checking the size of the EFI system partition
• Checking all spaces in the HFS data partition loader
• EFI system partition file system check
• Checking the partitions of the Core Storage physical volume
• The partition map seems fine

If you see the message that the disk needs to be repaired, you can click the Repair Disk button. If the disk in question is the boot disk, this option may not be displayed. However, this does not indicate that you cannot repair the disk. You can easily do it, however there will be an extra step involved.

You can run the hard drive on all advanced systems like High Sierra, macOS Sierra, OS X Lion, Yosemite, OS X Mavericks, etc.

1. Reboot your system and hold down Command +R. There is a self retention option on many systems. You can hold it until you start to see a spinning globe or the Apple logo on the screen.
2. Go to the start menu and choose “Recovery HD”.
3. Choose “Disk Utility” on the Mac Utilities screen.

4. Click on the hard drive where the error was reported.
5. Click the First Aid >>Repair Disk tab.
6. Once this repair is done, you will be able to start the system normally and the drive problems will be completed.

You can restart your Mac in single user mode to repair your hard drive by following these steps.

1. Back up your files and turn off your computer.
2. Then hold Command + S to launch Single User Mode.
3. Once the mode is active, you will see white text on a black screen. This boot up will take time.
4. When finished each line will appear with “localhost//”.
5. Type the command fsck -fy and press Return, the disk check messages will appear on the screen.
6. When the process is done, you can check the message saying “Volume seems to be OK”. If you don’t see this message, you can repeat this process until you do.
7. Once you see the message, type Restart and hit Return and then you will exit single user mode.
8. When the system boots, you can boot the drive through Disk Utility to make sure the drive is working properly.

If the above steps don’t work and your hard drive is damaged beyond repair, you should contact your local Apple Store. In case you can’t stop by the nearest store or find a certified technician, you can still recover data from crashed Mac drive using professional Mac data recovery software like Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac. This software restores data from a crashed or unbootable Mac using a recovery drive. It is compatible with the latest version of macOS Big Sur and other previous versions. You can recover all types of files, including photos, audio, videos, and more. You can download the free trial version of the software to test its performance before purchasing the premium version.

Also Read: Recover Deleted Files from External Hard Drive on Mac

Categories: Technology
Source: SCHOOL TRANG DAI