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 ...

Boot disk recovery and repair toolkits don’t get any better than this Windows-based environment. The more things change, the more things stay the same. For Active@ Boot Disk 7.1, that means continuing ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

For years I've been deploying Macs by using Disk Utility to image the boot drive from a .dmg file. Aside from having to make a new image every time new hardware comes out it's a very convenient system ...

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 ...

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 ...

I harbor no nostalgia for Mac OS 9. Aside from a couple of old games, I never even think about using OS 9 anymore. With one exception...I long for OS 9's simplicity in creating bootable drives and ...