What's the equivalent of CHKDSK in Mac?

In Disk Utility (Utilities folder) select the drive in the left column (the drive, all the way at the left, not the volume indented below it).

At the bottom of the window make sure "S.M.A.R.T. Status" shows "Verified". This means the drive is not indicating any hardware errors.

In the "First Aid" tab, click the "Verify" button to check the directory structure.

Click the "Repair Permissions" button to check permissions on system files. This may generate a lot of error messages, but they can be ignored. If you run it a second time, most will be gone.
<http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448>

Defragmentation is not recommended.

The important thing is to always have good backups, via Time Machine or other methods. A drive can fail at any time, with no warning.

Just to expand a bit on the "defrag" question, it's rare that Macs need defragging.

That's because OSX does it automatically on any file under 20 mb.

The only time it may become an issue is if you consistently run with your internal HD nearly full (OSX likes 15% or more free), and frequently add or change lots of large files. Some folks doing very heavy video editing may run into fragmentation problems, but it's quire rare.

Being new to Mac, I would also suggest you take a look at Switch 101. There's a wealth of info there.



-mj

Message was edited by: macjack