Last week’s outstanding news was the discovery of a potential treatment for Huntington’s disease, that killed Woodie Guthrie at the age of 55, a tragedy I learned of from his son Arlo’s movie Alice’s Restaurant (1969).

That treatment is so complex that even James Gallagher’s diagrammatic account doesn’t do it justice, but it provides a much clearer picture than some of the treatment offered for our Macs. Although in a different league, our novel treatment of the week is Device Recovery Assistant, as I showed here on Friday. It’s sufficiently new that Apple hasn’t quite gone firm on what to call it. Its sole account refers to it as Recovery Assistant, in accordance with the menu command used to open the app in Recovery mode. But when it’s running, it claims to be Device Recovery Assistant, which sounds like it might also be good for your iPhone or iPad, but isn’t. That’s a similar feature added to iOS and iPadOS 26, as explained here.

I’m still a little wary of magic healing tools in Recovery mode. The first is there even now, waiting to catch those who’ve taken AI a little too seriously, and think running repairHomePermissions might be a good idea. Whatever you do, please don’t try this one at home, as its effects can be devastating. I now only run it in a disposable virtual machine, as reversing its changes would be so time-consuming.

In Recovery mode, typing repairHomePermissions into Terminal launches a GUI app to ‘repair permissions’ in a selected Home folder in the Data volume. Far from repairing them, each time I have tried this it locks me out of every folder in my Home folder and wreaks havoc elsewhere. Yet somehow this historical remnant has been left behind in Recovery mode to catch the unwary.

(Device) Recovery Assistant doesn’t appear to do anything so disastrous, but Apple is completely opaque as to what it actually does. Even its description for macOS 26 beta testing used the same words, “Recovery Assistant is a new way to recover your device if it doesn’t start up normally. It can look for problems and attempt to resolve them if found.”

Just what “issues” can it discover, and how might it attempt to “resolve” them? One thing I can report is that it doesn’t attempt to repair the damage done by repairHomePermissions, and doesn’t see anything wrong with a user not having permissions to access their own folders. Maybe it isn’t that smart yet.

One small clue given by Apple is that it can leave your iCloud connection in need of a further recovery process run when back in normal user mode. Once again, though, information is lacking as to what that does, and why it might be needed.

Of course, if your Mac does have an appropriate problem that prevents it from starting up normally, and it instead puts itself into Recovery Assistant, you have little option but to give it a whirl and hope that it fixes whatever was causing the problem. But why might you want to run Recovery Assistant voluntarily from Recovery mode? Is this something worth doing for specific reasons, or is it just a universal panacea?

With Apple silicon Macs, we’re running out of panaceas. If you don’t know of a specific fix for a problem, most of the old tricks such as resetting NVRAM and SMC, repairing permissions, installing the Combo updater, and re-installing macOS have either become impossible or demonstrably futile. We’re currently left with the innocuous procedure of starting up in Safe mode, and quickly run out of ideas after that.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that Recovery Assistant is a placebo, but until we know more about it, neither can it be a new panacea.

If your Mac starts up in this new Recovery Assistant, or you use it manually in Recovery mode, please let us know what happened and whether it did resolve your problem.

One of the features new to macOS 26 Tahoe that you won’t find in Apple’s list is an enhancement to Recovery mode, in Device Recovery Assistant (DRA). This article explains what it is and how to use it.

When you put your Mac into Recovery mode from Tahoe, you should notice that Apple has changed the disk icon there, to one intended to more closely resemble an SSD rather than a hard drive, although of course it’s still quaintly named Macintosh HD.

If your Mac (upgraded to Tahoe) has problems starting up correctly, it should now automatically restart and open DRA. You can also enter it manually by starting up in Recovery, passing through to Options, and using the Recovery Assistant command in the Utilities menu there, where its app menu identifies itself as Device Recovery Assistant. DRA requires an internet connection to function. If you’re asked to choose a connection, opt for a Wi-Fi network if possible.

Distinctive to DRA’s opening window is its first aid symbol ⊕. Click on the Continue button to move on.

The next window invites you to send data to Apple for diagnostic purposes. Make your choice as you move on.

If your startup Data volume is protected by FileVault, you’ll then be prompted for the password to unlock it. Once that has been provided, DRA attempts to perform a ‘recovery’.

At the end of that, you should see one of three outcomes:

• no problems were found, and you can restart your Mac back into normal mode;
• problems were found and repaired successfully, so you can restart your Mac back into normal mode;
• problems were found but aren’t fully repaired.

When your Mac restarts, it may show a notification that you need to recover iCloud data. If so, open System Settings and you should see a new item in its sidebar to Recover iCloud Data.

If DRA doesn’t fix your Mac, you’ll almost certainly need to start up in Recovery and try to fix it there. You can also quit DRA to return to Recovery if you wish.

Apple’s support note doesn’t give any further information about what DRA does.