Repair Your Mac’s Drives With Disk Utility’s First Aid
Disk First Aid and the Startup Drive
You can use Disk Utility’s First Aid on your Mac’s startup drive. However, in order for First Aid to perform any repairs, the selected volume must first be unmounted. Your Mac’s startup drive can’t be unmounted since it’s in use, which means you will have to start up your Mac from another bootable device. This can be any drive that has a bootable copy of OS X installed; alternatively, you can use the Recovery HD volume that OS X created when it was installed on your Mac.
We’ll give you instructions for using Disk Utility’s First Aid on a non-startup volume, and then for using First Aid when you need to repair your Mac’s startup volume. The two methods are similar; the main difference is the need to boot from another volume instead of your normal startup drive. In our example, we’ll use the Recovery HD volume that was created when you installed OS X.

