Disk Utility Demystified

Happy Memorial Day to our US viewers!

- Disk Utility:

- A utility to deal with your disks.

- Helps to repair your disk permissions.

- Shows all disks currently connected to your machine.

- It can check and verify the health of your operating system disk.

- You can erase the entire hard drive.

- Use it to partition your hard disk.

- Can setup a RAID system. [For more information see episode 8]


- Allows you to restore from a backed up image or disk.

- To located your disk utility:

1) Open up a Finder window.
2) Select Applications.
3) Select Disk Utility.

- To use Disk Utility from a CD:

1) Put your OS X install CD in your CD drive.
2) Proceed to reboot your machine.
3) While rebooting hold down the "C" until the Apple logo appears.
4) Then select Disk Utility from the Tools menu at the top of the screen.

- Using Disk Utility to backup your DVD:

1) Insert the DVD in the DVD drive.
2) Select the DVD title from the menu.
3) Click on "New Image" from the toolbar.
4) Select from the "image format" dropdown, "CD/DVD Master".
5) This will create a ISO file that can be re-burned to another disc in the future.

We at Slurp Media Inc. do not condone piracy of any kind.

- Mac OS X is built on BSD Unix, which has a legacy of permissions.
- MS-DOS file system was used on Windows 98 and Windows 95 OSR2. MS-DOS file system is also called FAT32.
- UNIX file system if you wish to have access over all platforms.
- NTFS was introduced in Windows NT and is used in Windows XP and Windows Vista.
- On Windows XP and Windows Vista, it's not easy to format in FAT32 any more.