How to Use Apple Computer Disk Utility to Clean Up your Mac

Is your Mac taking longer to start up than it used to take to power on? Do you find it sluggish at times? Do you ever get unusual errors from time to time? This may mean that you need to run utilities on your Mac to freshen up the system. Apple Computer provides every OS X Mac with Disk Utility, located in your Applications/Utilities folder.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Apple Computer running OS X
• Disk Utility.app

1. Something to remember before beginning:
   
   Your Apple Computer's hard drive - where all your Applications are located - is your start-up drive. Disk Utility can not run a Repair Command on the drive that was used as your start-up drive. The option will be dim in the window for these devices. If you wish to run Repair Command on that main drive, you will need to start up from your Mac OS X System disk and go through the Install command to get to the Disk Utility Window.
   
   Your storage devices - you can only run Repair Disk Permissions on a drive that has the Mac OS X operating system located on the drive. So storage devices do not have the option to have Repair Disk Permissions performed on the device. The option will be dim in the window for these devices.

2. 
   apple disk utility

   Locate Disk Utility.app in your Applications/Utilities folder. Double-click on the application. The Disk Utility window opens up. You will see on the left-hand side of the box a list of all hard disks located on your system. Select the hard disk you wish to run Repair Disk command. Select Repair Disk. Run the command until you no longer find any error messages. It should be run until it looks as clean as the example in the picture, i.e. "No repairs were necessary".

3. 
   repair disk permissions

   Select a hard disk and run Repair Disk Permissions. Run the Repair Disk Permissions Utility until you get a clean message, similar to the example attached.

[kirktalon]

on 10/31/2009 You could add that this can be done from the startup disk and is sometimes the best way to get the OS to boot up at all.

[ashfeather]

on 6/23/2009 wow, very techy like. idk, but you made it a little easier. 5*s

[fossilhunter]

on 5/1/2009 I was wondering how to clean my mac up! Added to fav.