Disk utility missing - OS X 10.6

[FreakinEurekan]

Hoping someone's come across this - I'm trying to help out my sister with partitioning an external hard drive. She has an iMac with Snow Leopard, but the Disk Utility is missing from the Applications folder (can't find it with Spotlight either).

She's going to upgrade to Mountain Lion but needs to upgrade RAM first, I would assume that when ML is installed the utility will be there.

In the meantime, if she can locate her SL disk is there an easy way to extract the Disk Utility from it? I'm several hundred miles away so trying to do this remotely

Thanks!

[Intell]

Disk Utility is in the Utilities folder inside of the Applications folder. I've notices that Spotlight will sometimes not index the Utilities folder.

[FreakinEurekan]

I believe that's where we were looking (but it's been a few days, and I'm remote). I'll have her check again.

[xgman]

Just copy it in from TM or another install or backup.

[FreakinEurekan]

I remoted into her computer today. Her Utilities folder is almost completely empty. She does have the Snow Leopard DVD but I'm concerned about re-running the installer without a current Time Machine backup, and the whole purpose of getting to Disk Utility is to properly partition an external hard drive so that it can be used as a Time Machine disk (need to keep a FAT partition on the drive; she switches it back & forth with her Windows laptop that backs up to the FAT partition).

"Plan B" is installing some more RAM and then just upgrading to Mountain Lion, which will presumably populate the Utilities folder. If we have to do that I'll ship her a USB drive to make a current Time Machine backup prior to the upgrade. So it's not like I don't have options, but if there IS a way to extract the Utilities from the DVD - without access to anything from the Utilities folder (such as Terminal, also missing) - I'd appreciate hearing of it.

I did verify that the login account is Admin level BTW. It's the only user account on the system also.

[flynz4]

Originally Posted by FreakinEurekan

I remoted into her computer today. Her Utilities folder is almost completely empty. She does have the Snow Leopard DVD but I'm concerned about re-running the installer without a current Time Machine backup, and the whole purpose of getting to Disk Utility is to properly partition an external hard drive so that it can be used as a Time Machine disk (need to keep a FAT partition on the drive; she switches it back & forth with her Windows laptop that backs up to the FAT partition).

"Plan B" is installing some more RAM and then just upgrading to Mountain Lion, which will presumably populate the Utilities folder. If we have to do that I'll ship her a USB drive to make a current Time Machine backup prior to the upgrade. So it's not like I don't have options, but if there IS a way to extract the Utilities from the DVD - without access to anything from the Utilities folder (such as Terminal, also missing) - I'd appreciate hearing of it.

I did verify that the login account is Admin level BTW. It's the only user account on the system also.

I wouldn't do anything until backed up. Have her buy a new external drive... and have a friend format it for TM. Having independent disks for backing up her Mac and PC is a good practice anyway. Then backup the Mac before upgrading OSX.

Unless of course her data is not valuable... which sounds like it may be the case since she hasn't been backing up.

/Jim