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Solutions to your most vexing Mac problems

Disk utility tricks

Each month, I look outside Mac OS for helpful tools and utilities that can make a misbehaving Mac toe the line. This month, I’d like to turn inward and look at a multitalented tool that’s often overlooked—Apple’s Disk Utility, located in your /Applications/Utilities folder.

You probably already know that you can use Disk Utility’s First Aid tab to verify and repair disk permissions, as well as volumes other than the startup volume. But there’s a lot more to Tiger’s Disk Utility.

Wipe Out For example, if you’d like to protect old erased data from prying eyes, select a volume and click on the Security Options button in Disk Utility’s Erase tab. Here you can choose to write zeros over all the data on the disk, write nonsense data seven times over the entire disk, or write nonsense data 35 times over the disk.

Rig Up RAID It used to be a pain to create a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)—a scheme that turns multiple hard drives into one high-performance volume. No longer. Just connect a couple of drives to your Mac (I’ve found that daisy-chaining two FireWire drives from a single FireWire port is a good way to go), click on the RAID tab, drag the drives into the list box, and choose the RAID type. Mirrored RAID duplicates files on each drive so you won’t lose data when a drive fails. Striped RAID splits data into stripes on each drive. Concatenated RAID, the oldest method, simply combines multiple drives into one big ol’ volume.

Restore More When you want to move data from an old Mac to a new one, take a tour of Disk Utility’s Restore tab. Here you can easily create a disk image of a drive or volume and then later restore the data on that image or drive to another volume. Drag the disk or volume that holds the data to the Source field. Drag the disk or volume that will receive the data to the Destination field. Click on Restore to move your data from here to there. (For more information about moving files, see “Old Files, New Mac” [ Working Mac, September 2005 ].)

Make Multisession Discs Select a disk image, click on the Burn button, insert a disc, and click on the triangle in the Burn sheet to reveal the Leave Disc Appendable option, which allows you to burn discs in more than one session.

Erase Rewritables Erase a rewritable disc by selecting it in Disk Utility’s source list, clicking on the Erase tab, and clicking on Erase.

Say the Password Use the Disk Image From Folder command to create compressed, password-protected archives.

Eject Stubborn Discs If a disc is stuck in your media drive, try using Disk Utility’s Eject button to remove it.

Find a Classic Fix Choose Fix OS 9 Permissions from Disk Utility’s File menu to do just that in the Classic environment.

Tip of the month

‘Bird and the Word In the August issue, you suggested that a reader who wanted to send e-mail messages with embedded HTML should use a third-party AppleScript and Microsoft Entourage, included in Office 2004 ($399). An easier solution is to use the free Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client to create this sort of composition.

I use the Insert: HTML option every month to send out my company’s HTML newsletter from my PowerBook, and the results work like a charm on every e-mail client I’ve tested. Furthermore, Thunderbird has many other useful features that make it a worthy adversary of (or companion to) Apple’s Mail. —John Rork