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 ...

Keeping a bootable USB of the current operating system is just a basic tier of protection. It brings a false sense of confidence that one day, when your computer cannot load the OS, you can use the ...

Apple only sells OS X Mountain Lion as a digital download in the Mac App Store. The installer weighs in at a hefty 4.05GB, but the good news is that you can install your copy of Mountain Lion on all ...

I recently bought a new 1 TB NVMe SSD (970 Evo Plus) to upgrade from my current 256 GB M.2 SATA SSD. The current disk is LUKS encrypted using the default options were when I originally installed ...

i am ridding myself of floppy drives forever. since i still run win9x [stop the laughing -- --] i need to use a tricky disk to fdisk, format, and load the cdrom drivers before running the o/s setup.

Rufus is a free, portable utility that creates bootable USB flash drives from ISO files. As of 2026, the latest version is Rufus 4.13 — and it’s faster and more capable than ever, with built-in ...

When something goes wrong with your Mac, it's a boon to have a separate, external drive that you can work from — but Apple no longer makes that easy. Here's how to do it. The short answer to how you ...

Swiss Army knife of utilities.

If your Mac has multiple bootable disks—via either a partitioned internal disk or external FireWire drives—you’re probably very familiar with the Startup Disk System Preferences panel. As you’d guess ...

Non-existent. To create a bootable optical disc (or, similarly, a bootable Zip or floppy disk) was a bit more involved, but not by much. So how does all of this compare to the situation with Mac OS X ...