Do I really need to boot from another volume to verify disk?

In general you can, but it is able to do more if you are not booted to the dire you are verifying.

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bluearrow said:

I don't have a USB drive to make a bootable version of Lion so I was wondering if I can just use Disk Utility to verify the disk in Safe Mode. Thank you.

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You don't have the recovery partition either? It's automatically created by the Lion installer and it comes installed by default in post-Lion hardware.

Just boot your machine holding the option (alt) key and then select the recovery partition. Booting while holding cmd-r might also work. It should boot directly to the recovery partition.

bluearrow said:

How can it do more? I never noticed a difference when I used my Snow Leopard disk.

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I've run verify and repair (usually not just verify) from the booted volume and usual from the install DVD. I have seen it happen that the self-check reports no issues but the one from the DVD actually manages to fix the problem. My guess is this has to do with files that are in use.

As arubinst says, the recovery partition may be your best option here. I still have not fully adapted to Lion.

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bluearrow said:

But If I boot from that will I be able to use verify disk in the same way as if I was booting from a USB?

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Yes, you should be. You would be repairing your boot partition from a different and independent partition.

bluearrow said:

If so, why bother making a USB to boot from?

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Actually, you don't have to make a USB. It may come in handy if your disk fails (as in physical failure) and you need to install Lion on a new drive. Or if you accidentally wipe your disk and your recovery partition. It has happened to some people trying to use Boot Camp.

arubinst said:

Yes, you should be. You would be repairing your boot partition from a different and independent partition.


Actually, you don't have to make a USB. It may come in handy if your disk fails (as in physical failure) and you need to install Lion on a new drive. Or if you accidentally wipe your disk and your recovery partition. It has happened to some people trying to use Boot Camp.

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You can make a DVD copy of Lion using this utlity:
http://blog.gete.net/lion-diskmaker-us/ It is free and works great. It looks for the Lion install that was downloaded and makes a DVD copy you can boot to.....