One of the most valuable and useful utilities is Disk Utility. Utilities such as Activity Monitor, Terminal, and System Information also give you insight into the workings and performance of your machine. Clicking the Apple icon in the upper left corner and then choosing “About This Mac” allows you to investigate many details concerning the hardware and software components that comprise your system.

In OS X El Capitan, Disk Utility has a different user interface and lost the abilities to repair permissions due to obsolescence, create and manage disks formatted as RAID, burn discs, and multi-pass format internal solid-state drives and encrypted external drives.Mac users can gain a wealth of information about their system with tools provided with their operating system. Mac OS X Leopard added the ability to create, resize, and delete disk partitions without erasing them, a feature known as live partitioning.

Further changes introduced in Mac OS X Tiger, specifically version 10.4.3, allowed Disk Utility to be used to verify the file structure of the current boot drive. The ability to 'zero' all data (multi-pass formatting) on a disk was not added until Mac OS X 10.2.3. Disk Copy was used for creating and mounting disk image files whereas Disk Utility was used for formatting, partitioning, verifying, and repairing file structures. Another application called Drive Setup was used for drive formatting and partitioning and the application Disk Copy was used for working with disk images.īefore Mac OS X Panther, the functionality of Disk Utility was spread across two applications: Disk Copy and Disk Utility. In the classic Mac OS, similar functionality to the verification features of Disk Utility could be found in the Disk First Aid application. It is also possible to create and manage RAM disk images by using hdiutil and diskutil in terminal. status of a hard diskĭisk Utility functions may also be accessed from the macOS command line with the diskutil and hdiutil commands.

Restoring volumes from Apple Software Restore (ASR) images.

Adding or changing partition table between Apple Partition Map, GUID Partition Table, and master boot record (MBR).

Secure deletion of free space or disk using a 'zero out' data, a 7-pass DOD 5220-22 M standard, or a 35-pass Gutmann algorithm.

Erasing, formatting, partitioning, and cloning disks.

Verifying a disk's integrity, and repairing it if the disk is damaged (this will work for both Mac compatible format partitions and for FAT32 partitions with Microsoft Windows installed).

Mounting, unmounting and ejecting disk volumes (including both hard disks, removable media, and disk volume images).Creation, conversion, backup, compression, and encryption of logical volume images from a wide range of formats read by Disk Utility to.The functions currently supported by Disk Utility include:

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