Hard Drive Maintenance (OSX-Panther)

[6749974]

I have the new powerbook, running 10.3.9 OSX.

It started acting funny, and by that I mean I turned on the powerbook, 5 minutes later I opened a jpeg in photoshop cs, edited it a bit and hit save, then the hourglass ball thing started rotating for a few minutes and then all the desktop icons disappeared, folders closed, and the top finder menu bar went translucent.

its working ok now, but it happened twice and i got to thinkin', what if i have to fragment my harddrive?

Is there a harddrive utility I should not be without?

 

[IJ Reilly]

No, not fragmentation. OSX defragments the drive automatically. For basic maintenance, I recommend running AppleJack about once a month. Fixes most of the problems that crop up in OSX and cause slowdowns and other weird issues.

 

[capone2]

Run Disk Utility.....

"repair disk permissions" then re-boot

 

[Krazykrl]

Apple's 'Repair Disk' and 'Repair Disk permissions' from Disk Utility work great and that is what you would want to try first.

For more major issues having a copy of Disk Warrior handy has saved me out of jams in the past.