How to make a bootable OS X Yosemite install drive Now that modern Macs no longer ship with optical disk drives, you may not have an easy option to boot from another disk. If you tried to restart and the drive didn’t survive the experience, you may find yourself in an even stickier situation. However when dealing with dying disks, they may not survive the experience. So it’s often the first bit of advice you’ll hear.

It’s become something of a cliché, but turning it off and on again, is often a good way to reset any gremlins in your system. Here’s what to do if your Mac won’t switch on again. We suggest you back up your Mac at this point before running the risk of the disk failing again. If you are able to fix the hard drive or SSD in your Mac (or a external drive) using Disk Utility you will hopefully be able to recover your files. If you are using Yosemite or an even older version of Mac OS X, then you will see different options here, such as Repair Disk and the option to Repair Permissions…īack in the day it would have also been advised that you shouldįix Disk Permissions, but Apple removed the ability to repair permissions in Sierra, probably because meddling with permissions can cause all sorts of issues. Note that Apple updated Disk Utility in El Capitan and the options and capabilities have changed quite a bit since then. If during the process Disk Utility detects any issues and it’s easily fixed, then it should be resolved quickly.Ĭomplete guide to using Disk Utility here.This means that while First Aid is running apps won’t be responsive. You will see a warning that First Aid needs to temporatily lock the boot volume.It will then repair the volume if necessary. You will see a message indicating that First Aid will check the volume for errors.Click on the disk you are concerned about from the list on the left, and then click First Aid.

Open Disk Utility – You’ll find this in the Utilities folder, inside your Apps folder or by searching for it using Spotlight Search.

If your drive is having problems and you become aware of this before the machine crashes, or if you manage to get it up and running again (or in the case of an external drive your Mac is able to detect it), the first thing to do is launch Disk Utility. If you are very lucky your hard drive (or SSD) isn’t beyond repair and you will be able to fix the problem yourself and therefore get access to your files. This is part of a series of articles about backing up your Mac, read more here: SSDs are fundamentally different from HDDs, and although they seem to act the same, fixing them is a whole different matter, and the chances of recovery are far worse, however, we will examin your options below. If your drive isn’t a hard disk but an SSD (Solid State Drive) you may find the problem is more serious.

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