MacOSG: fsck your hard drive periodically
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Nov 17, 2006 at 4:29pm
By Dave Merten
One thing I always have believed in when it comes to maintaining a Mac, is preventive maintenance. One important part of that, is maintaining a healthy hard drive. One way to do that, is to periodically run Disk First Aid to check the integrity of your drive. Another way to do it, is run fsck. What is fsck? fsck stands for “file system consistency check,” and is a “built-in” command-line utility for verifying and repairing your hard drive.
So why not just use Disk First Aid? Well, in some situations, file system errors can prevent your computer from starting up, or reaching the login screen. Also, it may reach the login screen, but not load the Desktop after you log in. These issues can occur after an improper shutdown, forced restart, or power interruption. Also, you may run into a situation where you’re on the road and don’t have your install disc handy to boot from and run Disk First Aid.
To run fsck, you need to boot into Single-User mode.
1. Shut down the computer if it is on.
2. Press the power button to start the computer.
3. Immediately press and hold the Command-S key.
Next, at the command-line prompt, type in the following:
/sbin/fsck -fy
Then press Return. fsck will go through five “phases” and then return information about your disk. If there is a problem, it will automatically repair it and give you a summary of the damage.
So how often should you run fsck? Personally, I always run it after an improper shutdown, forced restart, or power interruption, as stated above. Any of these situations can cause file system problems, so why not eliminate any right away? It only takes a couple of minutes and may save you headaches down the road. It also wouldn’t hurt to run it whenever you do your periodic system maintenance.
The Mac Owners Support Group, aka MacOSG, was conceived in February, 2004 as the G5 Owners Support Group by Dave Merten, a former “Focus on Mac Support” guide at About.com. After purchasing a DOA Power Mac G5, and noticing on Apple Discussion Boards that people seemed to be having a lot of common hardware problems with them, Merten decided to open a support site for Power Mac G5 owners. He called it G5 Owners Support Group, registered the G5support.com domain and also applied to Apple to become an online Apple User Group.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
