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Mac OS X and applications might fail due to an inability to allocate storage space. In addition, low disk space might cause disk fragmentation. To avoid data loss and to ensure the continuous functioning of your computer it is important to monitor the amount of available storage space on your drive. Microsoft calls a hard drive that uses either the MBR partitioning scheme or the GPT partitioning scheme a(n) _____ disk. To boot from your OS X Install DVD, insert the DVD into your Mac, and then restart your Mac while holding down the letter ‘c’ key. To boot from the Recovery HD, restart your Mac while holding down the command (cloverleaf) and R keys (command + R).
Active1 year, 6 months ago
My Mac tends to pause every now then when preforming simple tasks such as right clicking, opening menus and typing (It actually just froze when I started typing this question.).
I've read in a few places that this may be due to bad disk blocks, and that the best way to fix this is to format and overwrite the whole disk with zeroes. Obviously, this takes time and will destroy any data I have on the disk. Is there a way to check for bad blocks without formatting the drive, or even remap the disk to ignore those blocks (ultimately fixing it)?
My Mac is pretty recent (Mac Mini late 2011), so I doubt it has anything to do with low memory or swappage.
Ron
RonRon
9 Answers
I'll answer the 'bad blocks' tack and you can ask a follow on question if you still have slowness and you have concluded that it's not simply bad blocks. (Bad blocks is almost never a slow issue - since the system can remap blocks so rapidly, that you'd need rafts and rafts of them to actually impair I/O. If you do have bad blocks, they can corrupt some of the data on the drive and a reinstall not only fixes that, it forces writes to detect more bad blocks - kind of a win/win situation).
You need no extra tools to see the health of your drive.
Open Disk Utility and select the physical drive itself (not the Macintosh HD or whatever the partition/volume is) and select info.
If you record and watch the values under S.M.A.R.T. Status and see how they change over time, you can know pretty much anything that is detectable about storage degradation or partial failure.
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bmike♦bmike168k4646 gold badges304304 silver badges662662 bronze badges
If we separate the essence of the question, from the reasons for asking …
Use an Ubuntu disc that works with your Mac, then run badblocks with appropriate options.
… click the heading for the full answer.
How to check whether there is bad sector on a USB harddisk on OS X? (2012-02-27)
- links to another related question.
More recently, in Ask Different:
- Figuring out bad sectors in my Macintosh HD (2013-03-05)
Be aware that relocation (or remapping or sparing, or whatever you call it) may cause dataloss
- DriveGenius 3 offers an unmistakable warning that may be not offered by other utilities.
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Graham PerrinGraham Perrin5,70099 gold badges6060 silver badges201201 bronze badges
I recommend Disk Warrior or Drive Genius, both of which should offer the option to boot from external media in order to analyze your hard drive.
bispymusicbispymusic
'Please: if you can't name a product, can you describe its method of testing?'
I can't blame him for not naming a tool. I have no idea where you live but in the U.S. companies can sue you for criticizing them.
However, based on his experiences with a 'famous tool' I would suspect it's initials are TTP.
From what I can tell, that product doesn't seem to do a very thorough job of doing anything. I've read reports that all it was doing was a raw read of a hard drive and flagging I/O errors as sector problems whenever it felt like it. It misses drive problems. I've seen this first hand, and it costs $100.
I've never used Drive Genius so I don't know anything about it. I can, however, speak of both Spinrite and Scannerz.
Spinrite uses what I consider, at least in its re-write mode, a very, very risky procedures. It attempts to read and then re-write a sector to a drive. This is OK if the source of the problems is actually a sector failure, but intermittent cable failures can cause the exact same problem. In other words, if an intermittent cable failure corrupts data transfer between the CPU and hard drive, it could very well end up first reading corrupted data from a hard drive and then re-writing it over good data. The potential for corruption in such a case is high. Spinrite is an ancient product developed for PC's back in the early '80s.
Scannerz actually isn't actually hard drive testing software, it's fault detection software. It monitors for I/O errors and timing irregularities, and it appears to do so based on a statistical model of the drive/system performance. The 'rule' with Scannerz is that if a problem is repeatable from scan to scan then the problem is with the media itself, and it will be either a bad sector or a weak sector. If the problem isn't repeatable on a scan, then it's likely another fault such as a bad cable or cracked trace in the logic board. Scannerz has an overwrite mode, but their manuals warn about using it quite heavily, as does the product which will throw out an a warning dialog about using it. Most if not all of the procedures they use for correcting problems are done using standard tools such as Disk Utility. I could teach my dog to do a basic scan on a drive with Scannerz, however to utilize it to its fullest potential requires at least a moderate amount of knowledge as to how a system works.
I have personally witnessed Scannerz picking up bad cables on an external hard hard drive. You can actually fool with a cable during a scan and watch irregularities and errors crop up as the faulty cable is moved around. To the best of my knowledge, no other tool on the market can detect that.
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With all that said, regarding other tools, the idea of using an old MS-DOS based tool such as Spinrite or something from a Linux distribution is likely impractical for most Mac users. I would be willing to bet most Mac users aren't even sure what Linux is, and they often likely don't know (or want to know) how to specifically isolate a drive so a product with its origins in MS-DOS can work, and potentially damage their drive. Such tactics may be OK with hard core techies, but they're utterly impractical for most people. I would also add that applications that appear to be doing little more than exec'ing system calls to the command line version of Disk Utility aren't terribly impressive, IMHO.
ElTorosDogElTorosDog
Before you start doing anything like this, open Console.app (I believe the English name is) which allows you to see if any I/O errors have been logged. If you see I/O errors you should immediately prepare to migrate to a new drive, as it means that your drive has run out of spare sectors for this purpose and it will only get worse. A typical way to do this is to use Time Machine to create a backup, and then change the drive and then reinstall OS X anew, and tell the installer to reestablish from Time Machine.
Personally I used a simple shell script that went through all files on disk and used dd to read them (and print any read errors while continuing). I then renamed the files containing the bad blocks so I would not use them again.
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Digital GrainsDigital Grains
We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.
Disk Warrior is for repairing index files on drives that have corrupted index files. Tool sets for sale cheap. A corrupted index file often makes the drive unusable. Drive Genius can do some index repair but it's best known for defragmentation. Its surface scanning is very basic. An entire list of drive testing tools can be found at the following:
![Best mysql gui tool for mac](/uploads/1/2/6/0/126016372/258088992.jpg)
I'm familiar with Scannerz, because I'm cheap! :-)
BSD GuyBSD Guy
Do you recommend Scannerz? If so, please add some technical explanation for the recommendation; and consider a separate answer. (I can't vote up this answer whilst DiskWarrior is amongst the three products.) – Graham Perrin Apr 19 at 19:38
I'm not sure 'recommending' products on this forum is really appropriate, since it might be taken as spam. What I will do is tell you my own experience with Scannerz and another 'famous' much more expensive tool.
We had several older systems in house, all PPC, all running Leopard that we needed to sell. Several of these items (about 5 if my memory serves me correctly) were showing what I could only call odd behavior. They would periodically give us the spinning beach balls, lock up a little, etc. We ran the 'famous' tool on them to do diagnostics, and AHT on at least 3 of them. They all came back with a clean bill of health. I thought, 'Well, it must be my imagination.' Within a month of selling them, we received notice from each buyer that the units were broken. We gave these things a 90 day warranty so our only option was, at the customers discretion, either refund the money and the shipping costs, or repair the systems at our expense and ship them back.
In each case, it was the exact same problem: the hard drive either failed or was in the process of failing and neither the 'famous' tool or AHT picked it up. We had more units to process, and having learned my lesson, this time we ran across some more units with similar problems. This time I was aware it was likely a drive problem, so I opened up /var/log/system.log and used the 'tail' command to follow what was going on. I did this while using the 'famous' tool. I/O errors would show up and the 'famous' tool would not so famously miss them..lots of them.
Scannerz was new on the market and it was cheap, so I figured I might as well give it a shot. Scannerz was picking up every single problem plus others! It was not missing the problems the 'famous' tool missed. In addition I found that if a unit had a bad internal drive cable, I could open the unit up, start a Scannerz session, and probe the cable with a non-conductive probe and Scannerz would either start tossing out tons of errors or irregularities.
The only tools I will use are Disk Warrior for fixing drive index problems Disk Utility, for some reason, won't touch, and Scannerz for evaluating drive problems. That's my choice. Those are tools I trust. Period!!
If you need technical details regarding how Scannerz contact the people that make it. They have marketing contacts and support contacts on their web site.
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BSD GuyBSD Guy
Use disk utility to find out the device name (e.g. 'disk4') then in a Terminal window try
sudo dd bs=1m if=/dev/disk4 of=/dev/null
This will try to read the entire drive contents.
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OS X’s Disk Utility—which enables you to format, partition, repair, and perform other kinds of maintenance on disks (including SSDs, flash drives, and disk images)—is good for what it does. Yet for many years conventional wisdom held that you also needed at least one third-party disk repair utility on hand to solve the problems Disk Utility couldn’t. Does that advice still make sense?
Disk utilities claim to be able to fix problems involving a volume’s directory, which keeps track of where all your files and folders are. (Directory damage, perhaps the most common type of disk error, can produce symptoms such as missing or inaccessible files, applications that won’t launch, and startup problems.) Most of these tools can also repair a partition map, which is a chunk of data that describes how data is to be stored on a disk; and many can repair certain kinds of errors with individual files, too (such as damaged preference files). Regardless of those details, when your disk is misbehaving, you probably don’t care if you have an invalid B-tree node size or an overlapped extent allocation; you just want the symptoms to go away.
I’ve personally had numerous disk problems that Disk Utility tried but failed to fix, displaying a scary error message that read: “Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.” On these occasions, I was grateful to have more powerful tools available. Many such disk-repair apps exist, but the big three are Alsoft’s DiskWarrior ($100), Prosoft Engineering’s Drive Genius ($99), and Micromat’s TechTool Pro ($100).
Apple has made ongoing hardware and software improvements that keep disks running happily more of the time.
Lately I’ve noticed something curious: While I used to turn to such utilities every few months, I haven’t had to do so in a long time—certainly not in the past couple of years. Anecdotal evidence suggests that I’m not alone in this; disk errors beyond the purview of Disk Utility seem to have declined sharply.
One reason is that Apple has made ongoing hardware and software improvements that keep disks running happily more of the time. OS X performs certain disk maintenance tasks automatically in the background—for example, it defragments smaller files on the fly, keeping all their segments contiguous on a hard disk so they’ll load faster. (Solid-state drives don’t require such defragging.) And, when you perform a safe boot (starting your Mac with the Shift key held down), OS X runs a more extensive set of diagnostic and repair procedures without you doing anything else. I credit these and other improvements to OS X with the reduced frequency of disk errors. In addition, Disk Utility has gained a number of new features in recent years, and it can now repair faults that might once have been out of its reach.
Whatever the reasons, I can tell you that my personal copies of DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro are all now several versions out of date, something I once would have found inconceivable. I’m asking myself, “Should I bother paying for upgrades? Will I ever even use them?”
![? Tool In Mac Os X Checks For Bad Clusters In The Hard Disk. ? Tool In Mac Os X Checks For Bad Clusters In The Hard Disk.](https://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/Resources/diskwarriorscreen2.png)
If you find yourself asking similar questions, I have two answers for you.
No! Disk utilities are a waste!
As I look over the feature lists of the major disk utilities, I find it striking that they all advertise capabilities that Disk Utility already offers for free. The three third-party programs can check a drive’s SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) status, repair disk permissions, and repair at least some types of volume corruption. Drive Genius and TechTool Pro can create a bootable duplicate of your disk and securely erase free space, and Drive Genius can also initialize and format drives. But Disk Utility does all that, too.
Disk repair always requires you to start up from a separate volume. But as long as your Mac is running Lion or Mountain Lion, you don’t need a second drive; simply restart while holding -R to use OS X Recovery, which boots your Mac from a hidden partition (or, in some cases, over the Internet) so you can run Disk Utility. The third-party utilities, by contrast, ship on bootable DVDs—except that they can’t boot the newest Mac models (not even if you use an external SuperDrive, for Mac models that lack an internal one). So in order to repair your startup disk, you’ll need to create a separate boot volume with the disk utility installed. (TechTool Pro’s eDrive is the sole exception here, behaving much like OS X’s Recovery HD.)
So, for most repairs, OS X’s native tools seem to be at least equal to the competition. And even if you encounter an error Disk Utility can’t fix, you don’t necessarily need to buy another app. Thanks to Time Machine, Disk Utility’s Restore feature, and a host of third-party backup programs, more Mac users than ever have great backups. In many cases, restoring a misbehaving disk from a backup can be faster—not to mention less expensive—than trying to repair the disk with a third-party utility.
On the other hand…
Yes! Disk utilities are still important!
Less frequent though they may be, disk errors do still occur, even on the newest Macs running the latest version of OS X. Modern Macs are by no means immune to directory corruption and other disk problems. And however much Disk Utility may have improved, it’s clear that it can’t fix everything. So, it’s still fair to argue that a third-party utility remains good insurance.
However, perhaps a better argument is that each of these utilities offers features beyond conventional disk repair. Here’s what they can do:
DiskWarrior has always been pretty much a one-trick pony—but it’s a great trick. It rebuilds the hidden directories that keep track of where all your data is located (damaged directories being a prime cause of disk problems)—and does so in such a way as to make it (in my opinion) the best all-around solution to that class of problems. If I encountered a disk error tomorrow that Disk Utility couldn’t fix, I’d still reach for DiskWarrior first, just as I did ten years ago.
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TechTool Pro can recover files that were accidentally deleted (as in, you inadvertently dragged them to the Trash and then chose Finder > Empty Trash, making them unrecoverable in the Finder). TechTool Pro can also back up your directory while the directory is healthy to make recovery easier if it gets damaged. TechTool does other things, too: It tests RAM and VRAM, helps you calibrate audio and video devices, defragments files and volumes beyond the optimization built into OS X, locates bad blocks on a disk, and monitors devices on your local network. And its eDrive feature sets aside a special bootable partition so you can repair your disk without needing a separate startup disk.
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Drive Genius, like TechTool Pro, can find bad blocks and defragment files and volumes. It also offers several features the others don’t, such as locating and deleting large or duplicate files and other disk-hogging resources, editing the raw data on your disk (a dangerously geeky thing to do), repartitioning a disk without erasing it (Disk Utility can do this too, but in a much more limited way), and benchmarking a drive’s performance.
All three of these utilities can also check certain files (such as .plist files) for damage; and they can continuously monitor one or more indicators of disk health, to warn you of potential problems before they become serious.
Only you can say whether the extra features in apps like Drive Genius and TechTool Pro are worth the cost. As for me, I no longer feel I need all these utilities, but I’ll need a few more problem-free years under my belt before deciding I can give up DiskWarrior.
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