Running Mac OS X Tiger

Disk Utility

The primary tool for working with disks and filesystems is the Disk Utility (found in /Applications/Utilities), shown in Figure 9-5. The Disk Utility can be used to configure, format, eject, and partition disks of all kinds. On the left side of Disk Utility’s interface is a list of the disks attached to your machine and the volumes that exist on those disks. Additionally, if you have any disk images mounted, a list of the most recently accessed files appears at the bottom of the left column. On the right side of the interface is a set of panels that give you access to the actions that you can accomplish with a drive. At the bottom of the window is a status display that gives you all sorts of information about the disk or volume you have selected.

Figure 9-5. Disk Utility

Some of the tasks you can perform with Disk Utility are:

• Mount and eject disks, including hard drives, CDs, and disk images.

• Get the type, format, capacity, and room available for any disk attached to your computer.

• Check and repair disks (other than the boot disk).

• Check and repair disk permissions.

• Erase a disk, including erasure by writing random data to a disk.

• Partition a disk into multiple volumes that subdivide the drive into multiple logical disks.

• Create and work with disk images.

• Restore the contents of a disk image to a disk.

• Set up a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID).

A command-line interface ...