[bergy]

I'm a little confused about what apple says about verifying your disk ..

From Apple ...
"Start up from your Mac OS X install CD or DVD to use Disk Utility when you need to verify or repair the Mac OS X startup volume.

Otherwise, Disk Utility may report errors on the Mac OS X startup disk, but not find errors on the same disk when started up from a Mac OS X disc.

Start up your computer from the Mac OS X CD when you need to use Disk Utility to verify the Mac OS X startup disk. (This is the most common use of Disk Utility.)

If the computer is started up from the Mac OS X hard disk (or disk partition) and Disk Utility finds errors on it, there is not necessarily anything wrong. Only when started up from the CD should Disk Utility reports of errors on the Mac OS X hard disk (or disk partition) be considered accurate.

Note: Mac OS X 10.4.2 and earlier do not allow you to verify or repair the startup disk with Disk Utility. With Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later, you can verify your startup disk using Disk Utility. To repair the startup disk in any version of Mac OS X, start up from your Mac OS X Install DVD or CD."
Can Only Verify Disk Properly from CD
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106270

Now what are they saying? Before 10.4.3 you couldn't verify your disk from disk utility on your computer because it was greyed out ... but in 10.4.3 or above you can .... but it's not reliable .... and for a truly accurate verification you have to run it from the installer disk utility?

If that's the case why did they make the verify disk command functional?

Or have i got it wrong .....

Could anyone clear this up for me? Thanks .....

[Big Mac]

AFAIK, you have always been able to perform Verify Disk on your startup disk; you just could not do a Repair Disk. So it's never been that useful and never will be. The strange thing is that with Tiger, Apple no longer recommends starting in single user mode and running fsck (which should be the functional equivalent of Disk First Aid. No one seems to be that discouraged by such statements - I still see techs performing fsck - so it's strange.

[proton]

In Mac OS X 10.4.3 you can safely verify the startup disk (if it's an HFS+ Journalled) volume and get a sane and correct answer.

In previous versions of Mac OS X, while it may have been possible to verify the startup disk you may get errors about inconsistencies that aren't actually there due to the volume being modified while the verification is in progress. Mac OS X 10.4.3 and later work around this problem by "freezing" the volume and using the journalling feature to allow changes to occur while the verification takes place.

Basically it's a cool trick Apple has done in Mac OS X 10.4.3 and later that lets you verify a volume while it is still mounted read/write.

- proton