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Apple's built-in disk management utility for the mac. Erases, formats, and restores volumes and drives.

Disk Utility.app icon

Functions

The functions currently supported by Disk Utility include:

  • Creation, conversion, backup, compression and encryption of logical volume images from a wide range of formats read by Disk Utility to .dmg or, for CD/DVD images, .cdr
  • Mounting, unmounting and ejecting disk volumes (including both hard disks, removable media and disk volume images)
  • Enabling or disabling journaling
  • Verifying a disk's integrity, and repairing it if the disk is damaged (this will work for both Mac compatible format partitions, and FAT32 partitions with Microsoft Windows installed)
  • Erasing, formatting, partitioning and cloning disks
  • Secure deletion of free space or disk using a "zero out" data, a 7-pass DOD 5220-22 M standard, or a 35-pass Gutmann algorithm
  • Adding or changing partition table between Apple Partition Table, GUID Partition Table and master boot record (MBR)
  • Restoring volumes from Apple Software Restore (ASR) images
  • Checking the S.M.A.R.T. status of a hard disk

Disk Utility functions may also be accessed from the macOS command line with the diskutil and hdiutil commands.

Usage

This tag is for all questions related to Disk Utility.

It is suggested that if you are asking questions about Disk Utility, or possible bugs in a particular version of macOS, that you add the appropriate tag (such as or ), to allow users to easily distinguish when questions may or may not apply to their own circumstances.

Related Tags

There are several -related tags which allow you to specify your operating system version, such as:

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