Mac OS X is regarded as an excellent computer operating system, as it is bundled with numerous features, one of which is its support for partitioning the Mac drive into a number of volumes. Well, having a number of volumes facilitates efficient data storage, which also makes searching for some particular files easily. Besides, users can install multiple operating systems in separate volumes of a solitary drive. Nevertheless, just like other computers, Macs are not too far-off from some common issues, like missing files, corrupt volume, inability to mount volume, and others. In fact, these frequently experienced issues on Macs demonstrate the fact that excellence lacks a lot to meet perfection.

In essence, users go for partitioning the hard drive space (which is available as a large block of free space) into a number of volumes in order to store various types of data separately. Unfortunately, Mac volumes are unable to shelter the data from threats like corruption. Consequently, users have to endure the loss of their precious files, which is fairly unacceptable. When it comes to finding out the causes behind Mac volume corruption, the unveiled responsible factors are frequent power failures, forced or improper system shutdown, virus or malware infections, volume header corruption, and the like. Being at the user end, one may not be able to prevent volume corruption, but he/she can certainly try fixing the issues when they come up. In this regard, user can use Mac inbuilt disk management tool – Disk Utility.

Disk Utility is the Mac OS X inbuilt disk management tool, which is capable of performing various disk related operations, including formatting Mac disk, creating and managing Mac volumes, imaging, compressing, and encrypting Mac volumes, verifying and repairing Mac disk as well as individual volumes, and more. In order to repair corrupt Mac volume, user needs to navigate to Applications > Utilities and launch Disk Utility, and then he can start fixing the corruption by implementing the following steps:

(a.) Launch Disk Utility

(b.) In the left pane, highlight the corrupt volume and click Repair Disk in the First Aid tab at the right

(c.) It most likely ends with the volumes repaired, but if it reports some error, try repairing it again

In contrast, in case a similar problem is experienced in Mac boot volume (i.e. Macintosh HD), disk repair process demands some external resources to rectify it. Meanwhile, user faces sluggish Mac startup or sometimes Mac fails to boot; also, applications take a while to execute, files take forever to open, and many other annoying symptoms. The external resources are none other than a secondary bootable media, which can be either Recovery HD or Mac bootable disc. After booting from any of the bootable media, user can follow the aforementioned steps to repair corrupt Mac volume.

Nevertheless, in accordance with the volume repair capability of Disk Utility and related statistics, Disk Utility hardly repairs a severely corrupt volume. In fact, the odds for repairing a severely corrupt volume using Disk Utility are minimal as compared to that using a professional Mac volume repair tool like Stellar Volume Repair.

Stellar Volume Repair

Stellar Volume Repair is a comprehensive tool that repairs corrupt or inaccessible Mac volumes in a shorter time span and with much ease. This volume repair software is compatible with up to latest version of Mac OS X (i.e. Mountain Lion) and is able to perform efficiently even on Macs with minimum system configuration.

Here are the system requirements to run the software:

Operating system: Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above

Disk space: 50MB minimum

RAM: 1GB

Processor: Intel series or PowerPC (G3 or later)

The software performs a thorough scan on the complete disk, including catalog files, journaled files, multilinked files, extent overflow files, volume bitmap, and volume information. After collecting the inaccessible data, the software creates a new directory by replacing the corrupt one, containing the overall data.

The following are the key features of Stellar Volume Repair software:

1) User friendly and Do-it-yourself software

2) Able to fix a slew of errors in Mac volumes

3) Capable of repairing Mac directories

4) Able to verify Mac boot volume permissions

5) Able to rollback the changes done in Mac volumes if they are severely corrupt

Repairing Corrupt Volume

Using Stellar Volume Repair software, user needs to follow the below mentioned steps to repair corrupt secondary volume:

I) Go to Applications and launch Stellar Volume Repair

II) On the software home screen, click Continue

III) In the left pane, highlight the corrupt volume and then click Rebuild button on the toolbar

IV) Now, the software begins to scan the selected volume and the three possible cases are:

• In the scan result, the software shows the volume is fine and there is no need to repair it
• The selected volume is reported as Rebuild
• The selected volume is severely corrupt and cannot be repaired. The software prompts to rollback the changes that have been made so far

Additionally, Stellar Volume Repair software features a bootable DVD creator for the Mac system, as it is required to repair corrupt Mac boot volume.

Below are the steps to create a bootable DVD:

i) In the left pane, select Mac boot volume and click ‘Rebuild’ button on the toolbar

ii) In the Create Bootable DVD window, click Create button

iii) Select a location to save disk image and proceed

iv) After it is done, click Burn DVD

v) Insert a blank DVD and click Burn

After creating bootable DVD successfully, boot from it and follow the steps to repair corrupt volume as discussed earlier.

Image source: EssentialMac.co.uk