When I run Disk Utility -> Verify Disk when normally logged on it says to boot up in Safe Mode and repair the disk. When I boot in Safe, the Disk Utility says everything is fine with the drive. Why the difference?

Question

Level 1

1 points

When I run Disk Utility -> Verify Disk when normally logged on it says to boot up in Safe Mode and repair the disk. When I boot in Safe, the Disk Utility says everything is fine with the drive. Why the difference?

I have a MacBook Pro 2012, 16GB RAM, 2.6 GHz i7.

When I run the Disk Utility -> Verify Disk when normally logged in I get an error saying "the disk permissions need to be repaired and I should boot up in Safe Mode and run the Repair Disk routine." When I boot up in Safe Mode and run Verify Disk, everything seems fine and it passes the check. When I return to a normal operating environment and run the Verify Disk routine it tells me there is still an issue. Why the discrepancy? Is there something I should address here? The computer has no real performance issues that I can detect, I was just running some general maintenance and decided to check the disk. Any way to get rid of this?

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Jul 21, 2015 8:59 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,541 points

Jul 21, 2015 9:33 AM in response to thebake23

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 [or the Recovery HD] should Disk Utility reports of errors on the Mac OS X hard disk (or disk partition) be considered accurate.

Disk Utility incorrectly reports disk errors on startup volume

Reply