Fix Corrupted Hard Drive on Mac with Two Methods

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How to Fix Corrupted Hard Drive on Mac with Disk Utility?
What To Do when Disk Utility Failed to Repair Hard Drive

Hard drive failure or corruption is the biggest nightmare for every Mac or Windows user. You can lose your entire data in fluke due to a corrupted hard drive.

Therefore, you should make it your habit to backup your hard drive regularly so you can restore your data easily. Also, to fix corrupted Mac hard drive on-time ensure to recognize the early disk failure signs, such as:

When you start to receive errors in Disk Utility like 'Error: This disk needs to be repaired'
Somehow any files, folders, or partitions becomes inaccessible or mysteriously disappeared
If some programs or applications run abnormally on your Mac
Mac operating system becomes unstable
Mac fails to recognize the hard drive while booting
Some grinding or whining noises coming from the hard drive
Your MacBook gets hotter when you run it for a long time
In the worst case, you smell a burning plastic odor coming from your Mac

If you are experiencing any of these hard drive corruption symptoms, you better hurry up and learn how to fix a corrupted hard drive on Mac. Luckily, this post will help you find the perfect method to fix your corrupted hard drive in no time. So, let's fix your Mac hard drive now!

How to Fix Corrupted Hard Drive on Mac with Disk Utility?

Disk Utility is a built-in Mac repair tool. It can scan the hard drive and fix most drive errors related to the formatting and directory structure. This program can also fix particular disk errors like when multiple apps quit unexpectedly, external devices fail to work, or your Mac won't boot up.

Disk Utility can scan and repair all the problems that your disk may encounter. Further, it is pretty simple to fix a corrupted hard drive with Disk Utility as follows:

Step 1. Launch Disk Utility

Launch Disk Utility from the Utilities folder under your Application folder. However, if your Mac won't boot up, you can access Disk Utility from macOS Recovery.

To do so, first determine whether you are using a Mac with Apple silicon or Intel processor. Here are the appropriate steps in both cases:

Apple silicone users need to turn on the Mac and keep on holding the power button until they see the start options window. Next, click on the Options button and then click Continue.
Intel processor users have to press Command and R keys immediately after turning on the Mac.

You have to select a user account you know the password for and then select the Disk Utility from the Utilities window in macOS.

Launch Disk Utility on Mac

Step 2. Choose your hard drive

Go to Choose View > Show All Devices. This Disk Utility sidebar will show all disks or storage devices available on your Mac. Here beneath every disk, you can see containers and volumes of that disk.

Choose the Corrupted Hard Drive

Step 3. Repair volumes, containers, and disks

For the disk, you want to fix, select its last volume on that disk and click on the First Aid button.

Click on the Run to check the volume for errors. Once Disk Utility is done checking the volume, check each volume on the disk and then each container on the disk. And finally, check the entire disk.

Repair with First Aid

What To Do when Disk Utility Failed to Repair Hard Drive

Disk Utility is one of the fastest and simplest ways to repair your damaged hard drive. But sometimes Disk Utility can't fix your drive, or the First Aid process might fail. In that case, Apple advises to first backup the corrupted hard drive and then format it before recovering data from the backup files.

However, you have to make a Time Machine backup before the hard drive is corrupted. That's because you can't back up the hard drive using the Time Machine after it has been corrupted.

So, if you haven't backed up your Mac hard drive before, you still have a way to restore your data. Yes, using the third-party data recovery software, you can fix and restore your corrupted hard drive without Time Machine backup.

Here Deep Data Recovery for Mac is the perfect data recovery software. As long as your hard drive can mount onto macOS X, this tool can even recover data from the physically damaged drive.

Moreover, it can recover the damaged Time Machine hard drives and USB flash drives or SD cards. Also, the tool offers:

Fast scan speed to find lost data
Export and import scan results
Recover lost data from emptied Trash
Recover unsaved Word document
An intuitive user interface makes the recovery process easy, etc.

Using Deep Data Recovery for Mac, you can recover your hard drive on Mac as follows:

Bonus Tip: How to Protect Mac Files and Data

No matter how careful or alert Mac users you are being, your disk could fail anytime, and you can lose your entire data. Therefore, the best practice to protect your Mac data is to back it up.

If you backup your Mac files and data in real-time, you never have to worry about disk corruption or failure. Fortunately, Mac allows users to back up their data in various ways, such as:

Time Machine

Time Machine is a free Mac solution to backup your photos, videos, or documents on your Mac. Once you set up the Time Machine, it can frequently back up your Mac data. You can set up Time Machine as:

Step 1. Plugin your hard drive or SSD.

Step 2. You will get a message on your screen asking if you want to use the drive with Time Machine.

Step 3. Click on the Use as Backup Disk option.

Select Time Machine Disk

Step 4. If the message won't pop up on your screen, ensure that the drive is formatted correctly.

Step 5. If the message doesn't automatically appear, go to System Preferences > Time Machine > Select the Backup Disk.

Step 6. Select the storage device and then click on the Use Disk.

Confirm Use Disk

Step 7. Just check the box next to Back Up Automatically to resume Mac backup immediately.

iCloud Drive

Apple users can also use iCloud Drive to safely backup their data. Here you can configure settings to automatically store Mac files and folders on iCloud.

Up to 5GB, you can backup your data for free on iCloud. After that, you can get paid iCloud membership for $0.99 per month up to 50GB, 200GB for $2.99, and so on.

To backup up Mac data with iCloud, just follow these steps:

Step 1. Launch System Preferences > iCloud.

Step 2. Sign in to your iCloud account and tick the box beside iCloud.

Step 3. Click on the Options box and check all the boxes beside every time that you want to backup in iCloud.

Step 4. Open the Finder > click on the iCloud Drive folder and move any folder that's not already in iCloud.

iCloud options

Third-party cloud storage

If you don't want to use iCloud to backup files, many other alternatives are available, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Here you simply have to create an account on your selected cloud storage and upload all your data.

Other disks

If you have two hard disks on your Mac device, you can backup files from one disk to another. Before moving the files, don't forget to compress them to save space. For this, just choose File > Compress.

External storage devices

You can also backup all your Mac files on external storage devices for extra safety like a USB flash drive, hard disk, CD, DVD, etc.

Conclusion

When your hard drive corrupts, it's alright to feel stressed as all your data will get lost with it. But if you have already backed up your data, you won't feel that much stress.

Here Disk Utility offers a great solution to Mac users to fix corrupted hard drives. Unfortunately, sometimes when Disk Utility itself starts showing errors, it will be impossible to fix or restore data using the program.

Therefore, in that case, it is a good idea to use third-party data recovery software like Deep Data Recovery for Mac. The software can even help you recover the damaged Time Machine drives and USB flash drives.

So, peeps, the best solution to fix a corrupted hard drive on Mac is timely backing up your data. This way, you can easily restore all your vital data despite hard disk failure. We have already shared all the methods to protect and backup data on Mac. So, you just have to pick the right method and secure your data now.