partition

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about missing Recovery HD partitions after cloning a Lion installation, upgrading the processor on Mac systems, and the requirements for running permissions repair routines when updating the system. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

NOTE: The "contact us" box on the MacFixIt page is now available for you to use when e-mailing questions. … Read more

There may be times after upgrading your Mac's operating system that you experience odd slowdowns on the system, either problems with general workflow or issues with booting the system.

Apple's original hardware that shipped with its systems should run its supported operating systems very acceptably; however, some people may have upgraded hardware components of their systems (hard drives, RAM, etc.) and suspect incompatibility with those components as a root cause of the problems.

MacFixIt reader Bruce wrote in with such a concern:

The OS X 10.7 upgrade should work independently of your Boot Camp installations, but some people may find that after upgrading to Lion their Boot Camp installations are no longer accessible. In some instances the Boot Camp partition will disappear and will not show up in the start-up disk preferences or in the Finder. In other instances the volume may still be present in OS X but will not boot when attempting to load Windows. The reason for these problems may be as simple as an improperly configured driver or because of custom partition configurations on your boot drive.… Read more

If you have your system configured to boot from a RAID volume, you may find when installing OS X 10.7 Lion that the system will give you a warning stating, "Some features of Mac OS X Lion are not supported for the disk." While you can continue the installation and get Lion running, what this warning means is the installer is not able to create a recovery partition on your hard drive, and therefore the system will not be able to run advanced disk management features that include FileVault disk encryption.

These advanced volume management features are … Read more

Unlike previous versions of the Mac OS, when you install OS X 10.7 Lion your system will be set up with a restore partition. This is a hidden 650MB partition that, like the previous installation DVDs for OS X, can be used to boot the system and provide tools to resintall OS X, format hard drives, and perform other maintenance and troubleshooting tasks on the system.

You can boot to the recovery drive in a couple of ways, including pressing the Option key at startup and selecting it from the boot menu or by holding Command-R at start-up; however, … Read more

Apple's Disk Utility program is a useful tool for managing hard drives and volumes; however, in Snow Leopard, Leopard, and other past versions of OS X, when you would run a drive verification routine it would only access the format structures of the volumes on a drive and check them. For instance, if you have a drive that is partitioned into two volumes, then if you select one of those volumes in Disk Utility and run a Verify Disk routine the program will check the volume's formatting in a routine similar to the following:

If on the other … Read more

OS X comes with a variety of tools and utilities for managing your system (available in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder), including those for observing OS activity, network and disk activity, and also those for managing some aspects of the hardware in your system. One of the most commonly used utilities is Disk Utility, which allows you to create disk images, burn DVDs and CDs, as well as manage the partitions and formatting of your hard drives. Disk Utility comes both in the form of the Disk Utility application, but also as the "diskutil" terminal command.

The Disk Utility … Read more

Some people who have purchased OS X 10.7 Lion are noting that they cannot get the downloaded installer to properly recognize their desired volumes for installing the OS. When the installer lists the available volumes on the system, it may say either, "This disk cannot be used to start up your computer," or, "Lion cannot be installed on this drive." This problem occurs even after people have run Disk Utility's drive-verification and permissions-fix routines.

It appears some instances of this problem happen with drives that either have been restored from Time Machine backups or … Read more

When managing your hard drive in OS X there are several potential problems that can crop up, including issues with the drive itself as well as those pertaining to the file setup on the drive. All of these can result in the inability to read or access files, and may, depending on the severity, result in anything from errors and brief pauses to system hangs or crashes. Apple lumps the management of some of these problems into its Disk Utility program, which is convenient but does have the effect of blending their meanings together, such as assuming a permissions fix … Read more