The Mac Admin's Blog

We all know the great app created by Apple, that is Time Machine. It is a brilliant application that every user should have and use it. In case you can’t manage to use Time Machine as your backup tool, you might want to try an alternative way to take one time backup. Here is another way of taking backup of your Mac using Disk Utilities. We will use this tool to take image of your current volume which has OS in it and can be used for back up. This backup is better if you don’t have a dedicated hard drive but use it once a week or so. As soon as you get this drive, you take a backup and then can replace where you got it from. Taking backup of your machine is way enabled you to use the newly taken image as OS whenever your machine crashes or you get another machine and you want all the files to be as it is on your older one. Great feature, lets try and explore more.

Turning off after spinning wheel/beachball/processing icon Exact issue that you might face: The machine will turn off after spinning beach ball. Before I mention the troubleshooting steps, let me explain the reason in brief. Mac has given a new feature in Leopard that enables the functionality to perform a disk check in the back ground and occurs at every start up. Now while performing this check if there is any irreparable damage then it shuts down the mahcine. If you face this issue all you have to do is using Mac OS X installation DVD boot the Mac from another volume/drive and then use the disk utility feature to verify if there is any issue and see if it could be repaired. If its irreparable then reinstall the OS using erase and install. I would recommend you to copy the data on another volume and then install the OS on this drive.

Disk Utility, Network preference pane, Console, Activity Monitor & System Profiler These are five pillars of troubleshooting a Mac machines. If you are facing any issue try to check if you could locate it and then try to resolve using these tools. A breif intoduction of each of the item is here and I will surely write details of each of them later in coming posts. 1. Disk Utility: Disk Utility , located in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder, can perform two types of repairs via the following choices in the First Aid tab: a. Repair Disk b. Repair Disk permissions. While Repair Disk can correct a variety of directory problems, it is generally incapable of repairing severe directory corruption for which you can try few third party applications, but before you try them, assure that you have the latest version of the utility that is compatible with the version of Mac OS X you are using. Repair Disk Permissions verifies and, if problems are found, resets (repairs)