Chapter 35. Verifying and Repairing the Hard Disk

If you had to rank components in order of importance, your Mac’s hard disk would be pretty high on the list. After all, the hard disk is your Mac’s long-term memory that keeps track of files and folders. Unfortunately, there can be discrepancies between what is actually stored on your hard disk and what OS X thinks is stored there. This can lead to all sorts of nasty problems, including missing files, random crashes, and interruption of the boot sequence—something that can prevent you from even starting your Mac!

Fortunately, you can fix most of these issues with Disk Utility, the same application you learned about in Chapter 34. If that doesn’t work, you can try fsck, a command-line utility that’s ...

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