Drive Partition Manager for Mac OS X Mavericks

Do you want to create a new partition in your Mac hard drive or you want to resize an existing partition? There are many efficient Mac Partitioning tools for those OS X users, who don't feel free to collaborate with disk utility. These utilities are helpful in creating new partitions, deleting/formatting unwanted partitions and resizing an existing partition in your Mac hard drive.

Having multiple partitions onto the Mac drive help us to keep different types of data separately. The media technicals need to store snapshots, videos, HDR photos in an organized manner always. So, it is must to store that huge important data in individuals partitions. This is the reason, whether the hard drive is new or an old one, users need to create partitions.

How to Fix Boot Camp Partitioning Issues in Mac OS X?

If you buy an Apple Mac system then you won't be limited to just Mac's own OS X. Boot Camp is a built-in utility in Mac for running Microsoft Windows at native speed with the same hardware. If your Mac is running OS X v10.5 or Mac OS X v10.6 then boot camp assistant support software can be installed by Mac OS X installation DVD. Else if your Mac machine is running with OS X 10.7 or later, windows support driver directly from 'Boot Camp Assistant' can be downloaded very easily. After proper download procedure completion, Windows OS can be installed using DVD or downloaded version.

List of booting Operating Systems

If boot camp assistant v5.1 is presently installed in Mac then Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Enterprise versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 are not supported. To get the above mentioned Windows version, install Boot Camp 4 which supports 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows 7, depending on the Mac model you have. 

Give rapid Speed to Your Slow Mac

Are you encountering a problem of slow Mac? Many Mac users will give an affirmative response to this question. After working over few months, new Mac system appears slower and takes more time to perform even simple operations. There can be a number of possible reasons behind the slowing down of Mac system, including unwanted files, browsing cache, unused applications/widgets/plug-ins etc. Sometimes, external devices plugged to our system make it slower. Lower capacity SSDs are also one of the reasons of slow Mac. Having less space onto startup drive volume and less amount of installed RAM, distract a Mac to perform at its best. If heavy applications like photoshop, 3D games etc. are installed then faster graphics cards are needed to maintain the pace. So, in order to regain the speed of your Mac, you need to use any speedup Mac utility.

Every now and then you install new applications, plug-ins and widgets in your system and most of those installed applications remain unused for a long time. When you browse Internet, for every instance, the system generates many temporary items, caches, log files. Once you close the current browsing instance, these temporary files become useless and the next time, a new set of temporary files are generated. This process goes on, eating up big amount of Mac HD space. If you like, you can find and delete caches manually on regular basis in Home> Library>Cache.

Similarly, when you download/install an application, the software installs language files for different supported languages. But, from a set of languages, you use the software hardly in one or two languages and thus rest of the language files just lie on the system, unused. Moreover, there remain many applications, plug-ins and widgets are no longer used by you.

Also, there are many unnecessary files in the system, such as universal binaries, large unused files, and duplicate files etc, which only fill-up the space of the hard drive and make Mac slow.

Therefore, after using the Mac over few months, the system gathers many unwanted files and applications, which collectively occupy significant amount of hard drive space and decrease the speed.

If you can remove those unwanted files from your system, then the system performance will definitely get improved. But, finding each and every unwanted file from a large hard drive, is a cumbersome job. That is why, these days, you can find many utilities available in the market, which can help optimize Mac.

These utilities come with options that can locate and remove unnecessary files from the system. Moreover, the utilities incorporate highly interactive graphical user interfaces to perform the speedup operations, without even any technical knowledge.

Clean & Speedup Your Slow Mac

There are many quick solutions to revive a sluggish Mac within few clicks. One of them is Stellar Speedup Mac Software, which figure out the actual problems of slow Mac and gives a new life by removing unwanted, large, duplicate files, junks, trashes from Mac volumes permanently. This utility clean up useless installed applications, widgets, plug-ins and frees up drive space not only in a single volume but also from startup volume.

Stellar Speedup Mac

This software is the best one to optimize Mac speed and compatible with OS X 10.3 and later versions. You need to click on the rocket button, showing on the welcome screen after installing this software. To obtain the list of unused stuff from Boot volume, you need to select 'Recommended Scan' option and follow the step-by-step procedure of garbage elimination. And within few seconds it will improve the productivity of your old and crawling Mac as fast as the best.

How to Show/Hide Files in Mac OS X?

Apple includes a way of viewing the hidden files and folders easily in Mac with the help of Terminal (Applications> Utilities> Terminal). It is a usual query, when we download any file or video clip then those files don't show up over desktop to proceed any operation further (play/delete). They are nowhere to be found in the Finder. What is unusual to notice about this query, is that video file is accessible from media player.

Those downloaded files which includes “.” in front of the name are considered "invisible" on Unix-based systems, and will therefore be invisible to a user in the Finder tab also. To locate and make those files visible, enable the ability for the Finder utility.

Step 1: Open Terminal by clicking Applications> Utilities> Terminal or right click on Finder icon in dock and click on Relaunch by holding 'Alt' key simultaneously.  

Simple Steps to Clone Mac Hard Drive for Preventing Data Loss

Usually, all of you maintain the backup of your precious files and folders, but you may

sometimes need a bootable backup or (more precisely) clone of your hard drive. Mac

users need not worry in all such cases, as Mac OS X provides the feature to back up

almost everything on it, including the Operating System (OS), files, software. This

backup is known as clone of your hard drive.

The hard drive clone enables you to have your complete system on an external hard drive

or other external data storage media, which you can boot anytime without needing to

install the OS again. Additionally, the clone is the best source of data backup that helps

Mac users for easily overcoming disastrous situations of data loss. Apart from this, some

people want to have a spare system wherein they can test all the new software and

applications before installing them to their system. For them, clone of their hard drive

works as a boon.

The ‘Disk Utility’ of your Mac is the tool to perform the cloning of your hard drive.

However, you need to have a destination drive (an external hard drive or other external

data storage media) for cloning your complete hard drive to it. Before starting the cloning process,

make sure that your target or destination drive is not having any data. Since the

cloning process writes everything from the source drive to the destination drive, the

chances of overwriting of data on destination drive are high. Thus, it is said to observe

this precaution.

Follow the below mentioned steps to perform the cloning of your hard 

drive with ‘Disk

Utility’ of your Mac OS X:

• Step 1: Attach the external hard drive to your system.
• Step 2: Open ‘Disk Utility’ by going to the path ‘User >>Applications >> Utilities >
  > Disk Utility’.
• Step 3: From the left pane of the ‘Disk Utility’, select the hard drive 
  of which you want to create the clone, and then click the ‘Restore’ tab
  provided at the top of the right pane.
• Step 4: The drive that you want to clone is listed under ‘Source’ field. Select the drive on which you want to copy everything and drag it to 
  the ‘Destination’ field.
• Step 5: Click ‘Restore’ button provided at the bottom of this interface. Note: Ensure that there is nothing important on the destination drive because it will be erased after the cloning.

If everything works fine, you will be able to have a complete clone of your

hard drive on the destination drive easily. However, this cloning process 

may take a large amount of time, which entirely depends upon the size of 

your source drive. Moreover, it is assumed that your source drive has only 

one partition or volume.

In case your source drive is having multiple partitions and you want all the

partitions to be cloned,then make sure your destination drive or target hard

drive has the same number and size of partitions. That means the partition structure of both the drives source and destination must match.

Once identical partitions are created on your target hard drive, you can 

easily clone each partition or volume using the above method, except the

OS partition. This clearly indicates that the bootable clone of a hard drive

cannot be created with ‘Disk Utility’, if it has multiple partitions or 

volumes on your source hard drive.

Therefore, in situations wherein you want to create the bootable backup of your Mac hard drive that is having multiple partitions and that too without taking much time, using professional utility to clone Mac drive is recommended. A professional software like Stellar Drive Clone creates 

the exact replica of your Mac hard drives and logical volumes. 

Apart from cloning, the software also provides some other efficient features

like imaging with which you can create the image of one hard drive volume

or the complete volume. 

The availability of the software to create bootable volume or minimal

system keeps you away from the grief of Disk Utility’s inability to create

the bootable clone of Mac that has partitions.

Moreover, this efficient utility enables you to make full use of the storage space on your destination

drive by allowing you to resize volumes during the process of cloning. The option ‘Clone with resizing’ enables you to resize volumes on your 

destination drive and utilize all of its storage space.However, if you wish,

you can also select the option to clone the hard drive without resizing the destination drive. The software provides you both the options. The simple steps of this software for creating the clone of hard drive without resizing

the destination drive are:

• Step 1: Run ‘Stellar Drive Clone’ software.
• Step 2: Go to ‘Clone & Imaging’ tab and click the ‘Clone’ button. 
  This displays the cloning screen.
• Step 3: Select ‘Disk Clone’ option, and then opt for the option that says ‘Clone without resizing’
• Step 4: Select your ‘Source’ drive and the ‘Destination’ drive from 
  ‘Select Source’ list and 'Select Destination’ list respectively.
• Step 5: Click ‘Continue’ for starting the cloning process.

With these simple steps, the software will clone the entire source drive to 

the destination

drive without making any changes to it. However, before selecting any storage drive as destination or target drive, make sure that it is larger than or equal

to in size than the source drive. If you want to create the clone of your hard 

drive by resizing your destination drive, follow the below mentioned steps:

• Step 1: Run ‘Stellar Drive Clone’ application.
• Step 2: Go to ‘Clone & Imaging’ tab and click the ‘Clone’ button. You 
  will get a‘Cloning’ screen.
• Step 3: Select ‘Disk Clone’ option, and then select ‘Clone with resizing’ option.
• Select the source and destination drive from ‘Select Source’ list and ‘Select Destination’ list.
• Step 4: Click ‘Continue’ and you will see the resizing window.
• Step 5: Now select the volume that you want to resize. Enter new size 
  or drag the
  slider to mention the new size of the Volume(s) in your destination drive. Click ‘Accept Size’ every time you make changes in the size of the volume(s).
• Step 6: Click ‘Continue’ for starting the cloning process.

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So far, you have seen that commercial software are certainly better than

‘Disk Utility’,as

they not only enable you to create the bootable clone of a hard drive 

having partitions, but

also lets you resize volumes on the destination drive.The easily 

understandable steps of Stellar Drive Clone tool let you perform the cloning of your hard drive by your own without needing any help of a professionalor technical user.

To analyze this tool, you can initially download its free demo version.

The demo lets you perform various cloning options very exhaustively; 

however, to create the final image of your hard drive,you need to purchase

the license of the software, which bears a reasonable cost.

Why to Clone Mac OS X 10.8.3 Drive

Recently, Apple Inc. released the latest Mac OS X Mountain Lion version (i.e. Mac OS X 10.8.3), thereby fixing the bugs in Safari, Security Update 2013-001, and many other apps. Many of you might have upgraded to OS X 10.8.3 as suggested by Apple. Mac OS X 10.8.3 integrates security, stability, and compatibility.

Latest Mac OS X version is likely to fix many of the bugs encountered in earlier and a few current versions. However, many users are complaining that their Mac machine is freezing, crashing, and a few are getting gray screen on startup after upgrading to the latest OS X 10.8.3.

Apple must be aware of the tribulations users are facing after upgrading to OS X 10.8.3. Therefore, the developers must make sure to fix the issues soon..

However, users are recommended to stick to their current data security strategies (such as Mac drive cloning and imaging) to protect their valuable data. As cloning a Mac drive involves formal process of duplication, the resulted drive is an exact copy of the source drive, which is used in place of the original drive.

After a formal upgrade to the latest Mac OS X 10.8.3, you certainly do not want anything happening adversely. Therefore, Mac drive cloning not only ensures the data is protected, but even ensures for robustness of the Mac machine. Disk Utility troubleshoots the issues (such as disk permissions error, data read/write problem, volume header corruption, etc.) encountered while accessing Mac volumes, including boot volume. Moreover, it facilitates cloning the complete Mac 10.8.3 drive at once or individual volumes.

Follow the straightforward process discussed below to clone a Mac volume using Disk Utility:

Open disk utility from Applications-> Utilities folder. Click the Restore tab in the right pane of the disk utility window. Now drag and drop the target volume from the left pane of the Disk Utility window to the source field in the right pane.

Similarly, drag and drop the destination volume from the left pane to the destination field. Now, make sure that the selected volumes are correct.

In addition, make sure the destination volume does not contain any data. If it does, move everything to any other location, as cloning is going to format the destination drive first. At last, click Restore button to initiate the cloning process.

However, if you are cloning the boot volume of the Mac OS X 10.8.3, it is recommended to go to Recovery mode, and then start cloning.

How to detect bad sectors of Mac drive and monitor its health

Why we need to check our Mac drive health status regularly? How to avoid bad sectors in your hard drive? These are some common questions that has been asked or searched by many Mac users. However, Mac machines are pretty good in performance and made of quality hardware and technology that makes it less prone to failure still it demands proper maintenance and care. 

We recommend backing up Mac hard drive in case of bad sectors. Helpful utility Mac hard drive backup.

 

So, we can say that Mac OS X is a pretty solid system, it just require your little attention and awareness towards its health and performance.  There are many things that one can perform to keep his Mac drive running without any trouble.

Things like: optimizing(speedup) Mac performance, partitioning drive, cloning(bootable backup) your Mac disk, checking Mac drive health status etc for maintaining your Mac completely. There are many applications available in market for performing the above mentioned tasks. But, here we will focus on about how to assess your Mac drive health. 

 

The first tool that helps in determining whether your Mac disk is encountering trouble or not is your Mac's own Disk Utility. But it can't fix failing things in your Mac drive. So, basically this inbuilt application checking your volume status if it shows error messages or warnings. 

 

As we know that no one can stop drive crash but can control by proper monitoring and maintenance. There are several reasons of Mac hard drive failure among them bad sectors is the prominent. So, here we will study about causes and types of bad sectors. 

 

Bad sectors is the area on drive which can't be read. Bad sectors can't be repaired but is is experienced that these can't be found in image of drive or volume having bad sectors. Hence, imaging doesn't consist bad sectors. 
 

There are two types of bad sectors – hard and soft

Hard bad sectors or Physical bad sectors:

Hard bad sectors are also called physically damaged sectors which occur due to head crash or in a fixed magnetic state during movement of platter. 

 

Cases when hard bad sectors creates:

1. If your hard disk is exposed to extreme heat while writing data.

2. When the head has comes in contact to the disk surface, a hard bad sector might be created. Please note that hard bad sectors can't be repaired, but they can be prevented.

Soft Bad sectors or Logical bad sectors:

Soft bad sectors are called as logical bad sectors which occurs due to logical errors. 

 

Cases when soft bad sectors creates:

1. If an Error Correction Code (ECC) found in the sector of hard drive that does not match the content of the sector.  
2. Hard drive formatting or logical errors is also a reason of creation of soft bad sectors. Unlike the hard bad sectors, soft bad sectors are repairable. These soft bad sectors can be repaired by overwriting the whole disk with zeros.

Detecting and fixing soft Bad sectors in windows:

If we take the Windows OS, then we find that there has been an inbuilt check disk tool, called "Chkdsk". During booting sometimes a message shown that it is recommended to run check disk for fixing errors. So, it is recommended to run this tool once in a month. It will scan and fix for hard disk logical errors, detect bad sectors, so that it will no longer affect window's hard disk. So, this way it keep away unstability of computer.

Alhough Check Disk takes about half an hour to perform its task. Time taken in check disk depends on many factors, like PC speed, amount of memory occupied on the disk, RAM and disk size. So, it is good to run Check Disk when you don’t need to use the computer for some time.

As we know bad sectors are the area on your hard disk that cannot be read. Not only that but they cause damage or unstability to your drive that may lead to a catastrophic failure. As we have already discussed the cases when they created so it is well known now that these are fairly common with normal computer use after a while. Besides the imperfections of the world we have some perfect tools that help us to detect and avoid hard drive failure due to these. Here I am talking about Mac drive Monitor application.

Now, lets talk about the tool for detecting and avoiding bad sectors in Mac drive.

Unlike 'check Disk' inbuilt tool of windows, Mac doesn't has any inbuilt tool available for detecting bad sectors and monitoring performance of your Mac drive.

But, in my recent search I have found one such tool name Stellar Drive Monitor for assess your Mac drive health.

Important: The above mentioned tool can not purchased as a single tool but it comes by buying “Drive tool box” -­-­-­- which itself a combo of 14 Mac optimization utilities(Drive Monitor is one of its 14 modules).

This tool does following tasks in few minutes:

• Scan your Mac drive for bad sectors
• Give detailed information about your Mac drive/volumes
• It shows performance reports of your Mac drive in order to make you aware and give chance to take any required action before emergency strikes.

This is recommended to take backup or clone of your Mac drive if you suspect that your drive may be failing anytime. Because, technically it is said that the more you use a failing drive or the drive having problem the more you decrease the chances of recovering data that’s stored on it. As this data is becoming completely inaccessible.