02-22-2008, 09:54 PM

When I was using a PC, there was an easy way to clean up the hard drive. There was also disk defragmenter. Is there similar way to do this with a Mac?

02-22-2008, 10:09 PM

Hello Dennis,
For Macintosh there really is no disk defragment needed. There is the Disk Utility under Utilities in your Applications folder that will check the state of your hard drive and make repairs to the volume if needed. If you want a good program I would recommend Onyx . It cleans up your disk a little bit by erasing old log files and crash reports. Best of all it's free. Nothing like Freeware right?

02-22-2008, 10:50 PM

Just to expand a bit on mac0s9user's post, Disk Utility in the machine can check but not repair the drive it resides on — in Tiger, at least. You'd have to use Disk Utility on the DVD after booting from the DVD to repair the hard drive — unless Leopard has gotten around this.

But if this is still the case with Leopard, there's a way around it. Booting the machine using single-user mode (holding down the Command and S keys as the computer boots) stops the startup process before the GUI kicks in. It leaves the screen with lines of type on it, and at the prompt at the bottom, type fsck -fy (note the space) and hit return.

This runs the same repairs as Disk Utility — a files check and repair (fsck) without the hassle of booting from the DVD.