recovery

If you have your system configured to boot from a RAID volume, you may find when installing OS X 10.7 Lion that the system will give you a warning stating, "Some features of Mac OS X Lion are not supported for the disk." While you can continue the installation and get Lion running, what this warning means is the installer is not able to create a recovery partition on your hard drive, and therefore the system will not be able to run advanced disk management features that include FileVault disk encryption.

These advanced volume management features are … Read more

Unlike previous versions of the Mac OS, when you install OS X 10.7 Lion your system will be set up with a restore partition. This is a hidden 650MB partition that, like the previous installation DVDs for OS X, can be used to boot the system and provide tools to resintall OS X, format hard drives, and perform other maintenance and troubleshooting tasks on the system.

You can boot to the recovery drive in a couple of ways, including pressing the Option key at startup and selecting it from the boot menu or by holding Command-R at start-up; however, … Read more

With the release of OS X Lion, Apple has included a few options to perform both maintenance and recovery routines on your Mac. These include a local recovery partition that allows you to boot to your system and reinstall Lion and run tools like Disk Utility. In addition, Apple is now including an Internet recovery option for new Macs that allow them to reinstall Lion without the need for any local media.

The recovery partition Apple's recovery partition is a small boot volume on your main boot drive that contains a number of key features for running and maintaining … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were four updates, for a display manager and customizing tool, a file renamer, a file recovery tool, and a popular maintenance tool.

The first utility update this week was for SwitchResX, which is a tool that can help … Read more

Recently Stellar Phoenix released a new version of its Mac Photo Recovery software (version 4.0), which is a $39 file recovery utility tailored toward identifying deleted and lost media files on disks, including a number of image, video, and audio formats. The program supports recovering files from both local disks as well as from a variety of cameras. In the past I was unimpressed with the lackluster performance of Stellar Phoenix's "Data Recovery" suite for OS X, but found that after using Photo Recovery that despite a few limitations it, for the most part, appeared to … Read more

When you delete a file from your hard drive, the system will by default just remove that item's directory entry but will leave its data structure on the drive intact. This allows the file's data to be overwritten, but it also means that until this happens, the file's data can be read and reassembled if needed, as is done by various file recovery utilities. To prevent files from being recovered, OS X comes with a secure erase option that overwrites the location of files on the disk with random data, which interferes with the file's data … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates for a couple of data-recovery programs and a couple of popular maintenance utilities.

Data recovery Stellar Phoenix is a company that develops a number of recovery programs for OS X, including the standard Data Recovery program … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates to a couple of maintenance utilities, one file duplicate management tool, and two file recovery utilities.

Maintenance

Two popular cleaning and maintenance programs have been updated this past week. OnyX is a free utility that interfaces … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates to file recovery software, some drive monitoring utilities, and duplicate file management tools.

Maintenance

Cocktail is a good option to use as part of a general maintenance routine and also has options to allow for adjusting … Read more