Curing Mal de Mac

Sometimes general or vague problems with a Mac - what I call Mal de Mac - can be solved by running Disk Utility and repairing the hard drive. But, you need to prepare properly. Disk Utility on your Mac will not repair your hard drive unless you follow the following steps:

If you are running OS 10.7 or later, restart your Mac and hold down the Command key and the R key (Command-R), and keep holding them until the Apple icon appears. After your Mac has finished starting up, you will see a desktop with an OS X menu bar and a "Mac OS X Utilities" application window. You can run Disk Utility and repair your drive from here.

If you have an older system, the best bet is to start up from your Install Disk. Again, you can’t repair the current startup volume with the Disk Utility that's on your Mac. You need to start up from a Mac OS X Install Disk and run Disk Utility from there. But many people, especially those who bought used or inherited an old Mac from a friend, may not have an Install Disk handy. Others simply no longer have a working optical drive, but soldier on.

If you have an older system, and no startup discs, here's another thing you can try:

Shut down your Mac in the usual way.
Boot in "single-user mode" by holding down Command-S at startup.
When you see the text prompt, type:

fsck -fy and hit <RETURN>

When it's done, type:

reboot and hit <RETURN>

Full instructions (and warnings) are found on this official Apple page.

One Less Mac Mail Peeve

In Apple Mail, hovering over an e-mail address in the “To” or “From” field shows a drop-down arrow that you can click to reveal a hidden menu. From that menu, you can copy the email address to your clipboard.

The peeve? It copies it like this:

Juan Sirrakah <juan@whodat.com>

...which is kind of a pain when you just want to copy an email address and paste it somewhere besides another Apple mail message address header.

So, if you'd like it to copy and paste just this:

juan@whodat.com

...do this:

Quit Mail, fire up "Terminal^†," and paste this into it (all on one line, no returns):

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

and then hit"enter/Return." Now run Mail and try it out. Cool?

To change the behavior back:

Quit Mail, fire up "Terminal" and paste this into it (all on one line, no returns):

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

and then hit"enter/Return."

For the most part, your Mac will do anything you want it to, you just need to know how to ask. If you are having trouble communicating with your Mac and you wish it would listen to you a little better, give me a call.

The White Collar Handyman is also The Mac Whisperer. There are no bad Macs... only inexperienced owners! ;-)

^†found in your "Utilities" folder. Don't be afraid, Terminal doesn't bite!