In short, to enter Recovery you need to hold down Command+R while your Mac starts up. Booting from this partition doesn’t do anything to the main drive, so there’s no need to worry about overwriting documents. This is actually a partition on the drive that contains a version of the macOS that you can boot from. However, as long as the drive failure isn’t too terminal, a restart in Recovery HD should be possible.
How to make a bootable OS X Yosemite install drive Now that modern Macs no longer ship with optical disk drives, you may not have an easy option to boot from another disk. If you tried to restart and the drive didn’t survive the experience, you may find yourself in an even stickier situation.
If you are using Yosemite or an even older version of Mac OS X, then you will see different options here, such as Repair Disk and the option to Repair Permissions… Note that Apple updated Disk Utility in El Capitan and the options and capabilities have changed quite a bit since then.
If during the process Disk Utility detects any issues and it’s easily fixed, then it should be resolved quickly.Ĭomplete guide to using Disk Utility here.This means that while First Aid is running apps won’t be responsive. You will see a warning that First Aid needs to temporatily lock the boot volume.It will then repair the volume if necessary. You will see a message indicating that First Aid will check the volume for errors.Click on the disk you are concerned about from the list on the left, and then click First Aid.Open Disk Utility – You’ll find this in the Utilities folder, inside your Apps folder or by searching for it using Spotlight Search.If your drive is having problems and you become aware of this before the machine crashes, or if you manage to get it up and running again (or in the case of an external drive your Mac is able to detect it), the first thing to do is launch Disk Utility. If you are very lucky your hard drive (or SSD) isn’t beyond repair and you will be able to fix the problem yourself and therefore get access to your files.