“How to set up Time Machine.” This is the moment you’ll wish you read those stories.Īt this stage in JV’s process, I was very concerned about his data.ĭuring one of our successful bouts of getting the Mac working for a while, Julian signed up for the online backup serviceĬrashPlan and copied over his most important files to a pair of external hard drives. Recently, we did a series of backup stories, including Julian’s state was that he didn’t have enough backed up. Long before this step, long before even Step 1 in fact, you should know the state of your backups. Then, all the same problems started recurring: crashes, kernel panics, and eventually a failure to start up successfully at all. To get some feedback about what’s happening, you might choose to start up while holding down Shift, Command, and V: That enters both Safe Boot and something called Verbose Mode, which spits out some messages about what Safe Boot is actually trying to do as it goes.

Safe Boot can take a while if it does indeed work. Shut the Mac down, and start it up while holding down Shift. It’s rare, but sometimes you can get your unhappy Mac to start up successfully with a Safe Boot, and then restart it normally, and everything returns to hunky-doryness. Safe Boot limits what checks and functionality your Mac focuses on during startup, and performs certain diagnostics. But Julian’s Mac was still misbehaving, so we moved on to step two. We clicked Repair Disk, and Disk Utility eventually claimed it had repaired some problems. In Julian’s case, Disk Utility said that it had found errors and we ought to repair them. You want that second one.) On the lower right of the Disk Utility window, click Verify Disk, and then wait while Disk Utility does its thing. (Usually, you’ll see two listings for your built-in drive: The first includes the drive’s size, like 500GB, in its name and nested underneath it is your drive’s friendlier name. Then, click on your Mac’s built-in hard drive in the left column of Disk Utility. (Once you see that screen, you can release the keys you were holding down.) Click on Disk Utility. Eventually, you’ll end up on a screen headlined OS X Utilities.

Macbook os x utilities on startup