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11.8 You can repair the hard drive on your MacBook Air by running Disk Utility from a secondary boot device.
Ideally, Disk Utility reports that “The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK.” In the worst-case scenario, Disk
Utility reports that it found errors, but it can't fix them. In that case, you need to turn to a more heavy-duty solution,
such as a third-party disk repair application. I recommend these two: DiskWarrior ( www.alsoft.com ) and TechTool
Pro ( www.micromat.com ).
Repairing disk permissions
All the files on MacBook Air have permissions applied to them. Permissions are a collection of settings that de-
termine what users, or groups of users, can do with each file. For example, if a file implements read-only per-
missions, it means that all users can only read the contents of the file — they can't make any changes to it or
delete it. For things such as system files, particular permissions are set during installation and shouldn't ever be
changed. If a system file's permissions do happen to change, it can cause all kinds of problems, including pro-
gram lockups and flaky system behavior.
Fortunately, Disk Utility has a feature that enables you to repair permissions for many of the files on your sys-
tem. Here's how it works:
1. If you can't start MacBook Air, boot using a secondary device. Otherwise, boot MacBook Air nor-
mally.
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