Apr 27 2009
The Quick Fix
Brought to you by: James
Do you use OSX? Do you have suspicious disk activity? Are you worried after a forced reboot? Do you just want to check things? Are you tired of having to re-boot from your install disk to run Disk Utility on your startup drive? Then I have something for you. Most OSX users don’t know about the power of their Unix core, but this is one trick that you won’t forget.
How do you run Disk Utility (or something similar) without restarting from your install disk? Just restart holding command-s (remember “save me”, for you word processor users), and you’ll be introduced to a new screen. The screen will be black, featuring white text (and 5 color letters in the word ‘COLOR’ in 10.0-10.2 only). Once the verbose (words) load has finished, you’ll recognize what appears to be the terminal. Enter /sbin/fsck -y (or /sbin/fsck -fy if you have File System Journaling enabled) and hit enter. You’ll want to continue this string until it finds no more problems (fixing a problem, may make another problem more…visible). When you’re done, enter reboot and hit enter.
Congratulations, you have successfully repaired your disk just as if you restarted from your install CD, but without the hassle. Please note that larger, more powerful disk utilities may be needed for more serious problems.
Note: If you are using Open Firmware (ROM) password protection, you’ll need to disable it to start with the ‘command-s’ key set.
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The Support Document for the