“Disk Utility hadn’t changed much over the years,” Glenn Fleishman writes for Macworld. “The hoary app used for creating logical divisions in disks, applying first aid to ones with data damage, and repairing permissions seemed a thing from a previous age.”
“With El Capitan, Apple has done more than slap on a fresh coat of paint,” Fleishman writes. “It has most of the same features, but the interaction and display is entirely different.”
“Expert users may be frustrated and resort to learning the ins and outs of diskutil, the command-line utility available via Terminal that’s always had more switches and controls than the graphical Disk Utility,” Fleishman writes. “But for many users who need to make quick and rare trips to this software, it could be an improvement: less frightening, easy to use, and harder to make mistakes.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The new Disk Utility is a lot more pleasing to the eye and remains at least as intuitive as before.
I can no longer put a computer in target drive mode and connect it to my recently El Capitan upgraded computer.
I have an iMac I need to do some disk repair on. So I put it in target mode and connected it to my MacBook with a firewire cable. Done this many many times. But my El Capitan MacBook can’t see the disk image anymore.
That is odd. I’ve been able to do this since the first beta (I tried to repair my failed 3TB fusion drive). Does it show up as a mounted drive in the finder? If not, the drive is the issue..not disk utility.
You may have more luck just booting into recovery, or off an external drive.
You might be right. That drive is pretty messed up. I have only tried that one computer in target mode. I like doing repairs in target mode because I have more tools available.
I will try a different computer in target mode to verify.
Is it a 27 inch iMac with 3TB fusion drive? If so..there is a recall. Mine failed 2 days before Apple announced the recall..the drive was not recoverable 🙁
Why not boot the iMac into the recovery partition instead? Also, if you think you need to do this a lot, why not setup a bootable external drive for this purpose? I use a USB3 solid state drive for this. It works great.
Anytime you can fit the word ‘hoary’ into a sentence it’s an up-vote from me 🙂
“Repair permissions” is gone! Hallelujah!
“Repair permissions” was the “zap the P-RAM and rebuild the desktop” of OS X, something unlikely ever to help with your problem, but invariably the first thing suggested by someone whenever you asked for help. I’m glad to see it gone.
——RM
I want my repair permissions back💥😱😖😩🔜
From the article:
“in El Capitan, any system file for which Repair Permissions would have [solved problems] can no longer be modified during normal operating. System Integrity Protection (SIP), also known as rootless mode, prevents modification to these files.”
The article goes on to explain that during system updates and certain other automated procedures, permissions are automatically repaired.
Yes, I’m very confused by the absence of Repair Permissions. And the new First Aid feature opening in a modal sheet is very bizarre. I’m not a huge fan of some of Apple’s new UI decisions. Seems like a world that I’m not compatible with.
Perplexingly, the Unlock command is buried in the File menu. I don’t understand why they didn’t share it with the Mount button on the toolbar.
You can edit the toolbar, and add the Unlock button that’s available. Works like any other toolbar in OS X, which is a good thing.
Ewww yuck. Who the hell is designing stuff at Cupertino. It looks like the abomination that is iTunes and IOS 9. The Apple board needs to clean house, starting with Cook and Ive.
“Don’t get so set in your ways that you can’t change.” — Sam Walton
What happened to the debug menu so I can mount hidden partitions?
Whomever says that “Repair Disk Permissions” isn’t needed anymore is full of it! HFS+ is still full of bandaids and still hoses itself. Apple should have gone to ZFS long ago. About every other month my MBP would start telling me I didn’t have permission to move a simple file around, and I’d have to repair the permissions. After repairs it was fine for another month or two. (Of course it’s no where near as bad as NTFS.)