Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

446 switching to the mac: the missing manual

A network administrator can use Directory Access to do things like select NetInfo

domains, set up search policies, and define attribute mappings. If those terms don’t

mean anything to you, just pretend you never read this paragraph and get on with

your life.

Disk Utility

This important program serves two key functions:

• It’s Mac OS X’s own little Norton Utilities, a powerful hard-drive administration

tool that lets you repair, erase, format, and partition disks. If you make the proper

sacrifices to the Technology Gods, you’ll rarely need to run Disk Utility. But it’s

worth keeping in mind, just in case you ever find yourself facing a serious disk

problem.

• Disk Utility also creates and manages disk images, electronic versions of disks or

folders that you can send electronically to somebody else.

The following discussion tackles the program’s two personalities one at a time.

Disk Utility, the hard drive-repair program

Here are some of the tasks you can perform with this half of Disk Utility:

• Repair folders, files, and program that don’t work because you supposedly don’t

have sufficient “access privileges.” This is by far the most common use of Disk

Utility, not to mention the most reliable and satisfying. Using the Fix Permissions

button fixes an astonishing range of bizarre Mac OS X problems, from programs

that won’t open to menulets that ...