Will disk repair wipe hard drive?

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Level 1

22 points

Will disk repair wipe hard drive?

After annoying "spinning beachball" activitity when my Imac was coming out of sleep, I started troubleshooting. When I ran Verify Disk in Disk Utility, I got this message:

Invalid index key
The volume Macintosh HD was found corrupt and need to be repaired
Error: This disk need to be repaired.Start up your computer with another disk (such as your Mac OS installation disc), and then use Disk Utility to repair this disk.

Question: If I do repair this disk, will it erase all data on it and will I have to reinstall the OS? Or does it just repair the problem and leave the data and OS intact?

Imac, Mac OS X (10.6.2)

Posted on Feb 11, 2010 7:34 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Barry Hemphill

Level 8

40,468 points

Feb 11, 2010 7:43 AM in response to FKandt

Hello F:

If I do repair this disk, will it erase all data on it and will I have to reinstall the OS?

No.

Or does it just repair the problem and leave the data and OS intact?

Yes.

Run the repair from your software install DVD. Keep running it until there are no more problems. If the repair fails, there are some additional options.

Barry

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Answer 2

thomas_r.

Level 7

32,001 points

Feb 11, 2010 7:47 AM in response to FKandt

If I do repair this disk, will it erase all data on it and will I have to reinstall the OS?

No, but the damage may be so severe that it can't be repaired. You could already have data loss. It's also possible that a repair of a badly-damaged disk could result in data loss, such as if the failure is a hardware issue and the repair causes it to fail completely. If you don't have any decent backups, you'd better make one (or more) before doing anything else with your computer. See my [Mac Backup Guide|http://www.reedcorner.net/thomas/guides/backups> for more information about backups.

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Answer 3

FKandt Author

Level 1

22 points

Feb 11, 2010 6:53 PM in response to thomas_r.

Thanks, guys......repair disk message informed me that data was corrupted and I need to reformat. I did so and restored from a Time Machine backup. About 7 hours later I'm pretty much back up and running. I used a backup date date of a few days ago and hope it was before any corruption. Hopefully I haven't restored an image that was already having problems. We'll see. Thanks, again.

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