Disk First Aid: Mac OS Disk Repair Utility

Disk First Aid was the name of a disk repair utility that was included or available for download with Mac OS 9.x or earlier. Disk First Aid was able to analyze and repair basic hard drive problems.

Disk First Aid was not a full-featured disk repair tool. It concentrated on just the basics: repairing catalogs, extends, and volume bit maps. Disk First Aid was the first line of defense, able to correct minor problems. When Disk First Aid was unable to make a repair, which was common, third-party disk utility tools could often do the trick.

With the advent of OS X, Apple vastly improved on the supplied ability to repair a hard drive and folded the functionality of Disk First Aid into the Disk Utility application. Disk Utility is an all-around workhorse, providing nearly all the tools and features most users need to work with hard drives or disk images.

Disk Utility's First Aid

Disk Utility kept the First Aid name and provided the repair service using a tab named First Aid. Within the First Aid tab were options for verifying a disk without performing any repair, as well as for repairing a selected disk.

Because repairing a disk occasionally led to a volume no longer working, as occurred when a disk was in such bad shape that the repair process resulted in unrecoverable errors, many people used the Verify Disk option to determine the condition of the disk before attempting to repair it.

With the advent of OS X El Capitan and the redesign of the Disk Utility app, Apple removed the Verify Disk option. The new First Aid tab performed both the verify and repair in a one-step process. While this may seem a step backward, it's a faster repair process, and with the quality of drives improving substantially since the early days of OS X, the repair process no longer leads to disk errors. It happens only rarely, but you still should back up your data before performing a disk repair.

Disk Permissions

Verifying Disk Permissions and Repairing Disk Permissions was another feature of First Aid in OS X. System file and folder permissions could become compromised over time when the file permissions were set improperly by an app, app installer, or the end user. Permissions could also become corrupt over time.

Just like repairing disks, permissions could be verified, which produced a list of files and folders with their current permissions listed, along with what the correct permissions should be. The list of files with incorrect permissions tended to be so long that most users selected the option to repair permissions and never bothered to verify them first.

Repairing file permissions didn't usually cause any problems and was often touted as a fix for many problems that could ail a Mac.

With the introduction of OS X El Capitan, Apple removed the file permissions verification and repair function from the First Aid feature of Disk Utility. Instead, Apple set up a system file and folder protection system that prevents the permissions from being altered.

Apple also now performs a file and folder permission check/repair as part of any update to OS X or macOS.

Other Ways to Repair a Drive

Disk Utility does a great job of drive repair most of the time, but there are other methods of performing the repair process when you're having problems with your Mac.