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OSXFAQ Mac OS X Tip-of-the-Day 
Trouble-Shooting III (Hardware) - Keep Discs Healthy
By Adrian Mayo - Editor - OSXFAQ
Don't overfill drives. Performance and fragmentation suffer if a drive
is more than 90/95% full (depending on drive size). System errors are
more likely to occur if little space is left for temporary or swap
files. Consider replacing the drive, or archiving information onto a
second drive.
Repair Permissions. Odd system errors are often due to incorrect
permissions on vital system files and components. Bad installers,
programs that have root permissions, and 'experimental' root users can
all contribute to incorrect permissions.
Repair permissions using Disk Utility in Applications:Utilities.
Select the First Aid tab and the system disc (or system partition).
Repairing permissions is only applicable to system discs/partitions.
If you are unsure which is the system, select a possibility and check
the mount-point shown at the foot of the window. It should be '/'.
Click on the Verify button to check permissions, or Repair to actually
repair them. Expect to see 5 or so lines of anomaly reports for a
healthy disc. Any more and a repair is recommended.
Repair non-system discs. Again, using Disc Utility, select First Aid
and the drive or partition to repair. Hit Verify Disk or Repair Disk.
If you need to repair the system disc, see tomorrow's tip.
About Journalling. In Panther (10.3) discs are formatted as
'Journaled' by default. What does this mean? Journalling ensures that
if a file system write operation is interrupted (because of a crash,
power failure, or whatever) a record (journal) is available to allow
the operation to be continued or reversed on reboot. If the operation
were not continued then the file system would be in an inconsistent
(corrupt) state.
For example, when a file is created, whether on a journaled system or
not, the file system must perform several discrete steps. It must
create a directory entry, allocate a block of disc space and record
this information, then write the data to the file itself. A journaled
file system will work out all the necessary steps first and write these
instructions to a special area of the disc reserved for journaling. It
then performs the actual steps as described, and deletes the journal
entry. If a system crash occurs part way though this process, then
when the machine is rebooted and the file system restarts it will see
the journal and take actions to complete the interrupted process, or
reverse it.
Select a new startup disc. If you have several drives, a nice trick is
to install OS X on more than one ensuring you can still boot if the
main OS X system becomes damaged. Use the Startup Manager to manually
select different startup volumes by holding down the Option/Alt key on
startup. (This does not work for all models.) Alternatively, use
Micromat's eDrive - see tomorrow's tip.
Enjoy !! :-)
Panther 10.3.8
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