Bootable disc image files may contain all the data necessary to create a disc from which computers can boot, but if you want them to work, you can't just burn them to a disc the way you would regular ...

Bootable hard drives. Creating a bootable hard drive in Mac OS X is not difficult, but is still a significant undertaking. The most common method is to boot from a Mac OS X Install disc, run the ...

OS X’s Disk Utility—which enables you to format, partition, repair, and perform other kinds of maintenance on disks (including SSDs, flash drives, and disk images)—is good for what it does. Yet for ...

Poor Disk Utility. It seems fated to remain one of Mac OS X’s most underappreciated utilities. If you’ve even launched it at all, chances are you haven’t gone beyond using its First Aid features to ...

It's easy to make boot disks on old Macs for older hardware, but as the years have gone on, it's gotten a little more difficult. Here's how to make classic Mac OS 9 and early Mac OS X boot media on ...

Free, open-source boot disk utility Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) automatically and completely deletes the content of every hard disk it can find on your computer when you run it. Sure you can fire up ...

Apple has released Mac OS X Lion in the Mac App Store for $30. Separately, Apple will also begin offering Lion on a USB thumb drive in Apple stores come August. Right now, you can grab Lion from the ...

When your PC stops booting, a boot drive is the electronic version of a defibrillator. If you can boot your PC, you can detect bad memory, chase bad sectors, change passwords, and recover data … all ...

Happy Mountain Lion Day! Now that you have downloaded the 4.34GB installer, you may want to install Mountain Lion on more than one of your personal machines. Do you really need to wait 45 minutes or ...

In last month's column, I described the hurdles that Mac OS X puts in your way when you try to create a bootable disc, especially a custom bootable CD, DVD or flash drive. I offered various solutions ...