Megabytes

Recently, when my laptop exhibited symptoms indicating the need to run some disk repair utilities, I ran the usual diagnostics and repairs with only temporary success. First, I booted from my Apple install disk and ran Disk Utility to repair the volume. When that didn’t work, I turned to Disk Warrior. When Disk Warrior couldn’t slaughter the hard disk gremlins, I became concerned that failure of the hard disk was imminent. Fortunately, I had a good, fairly current backup of my hard drive. Yay!
But before I sent my laptop to iResq (see post on March 4, 2007), I wanted to get a more current clone of my data.
Reading some articles in Apple’s knowledgebase, I learned about one other “tool”. See, it’s not really a tool, but an alternative way to boot up. It’s called Safe Boot and it’s accessed by holding down the SHIFT key at startup until you see the words ‘Safe Boot’ on the login screen.
Safe Boot performs a directory check of the startup volume; it clears some font caches and disables all startup items among other things. It doesn’t sound like much, but after a safe boot, I restarted and my system ran better. Albeit for only a short while. I made and tested a new clone of my hard disk, this time without errors. Then I sent my laptop to iResq; confident and able to continue working from my bootable clone. Safe Boot was a life extender. Learn more about Safe Boot.