How to make a bootable Mountain Lion install drive. But there are a good number of reasons you might want a bootable Mountain Lion installer on an external hard drive or a thumb drive (USB stick). Also, if your Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable install drive makes a handy emergency disk.

Also, if you need to reinstall Mountain Lion, recovery mode requires you to download the entire 4. GB+ installer again.) Finally, if you need to install Mountain Lion over Leopard—assuming you have the license to do so—a bootable install drive makes it easier to do so. I show you how, below. Though it’s possible to make one, I don’t recommend it these days. More and more Macs ship without a built- in optical drive; booting and installing from a DVD is very slow; and 8. GB flash drives can be found for $1.

DVD anymore. In addition, you can easily update a USB stick or external hard drive each time an update to Mac OS X is released, as explained below; with a DVD, you have to toss the disc in the trash and start over, which is both a hassle and bad for the environment. That said, if, for whatever reason, you absolutely need to create a bootable install DVD, follow steps 1 through 5 under “Using Disk Utility,” below, but from Step 6 on, follow the instructions under “To create a bootable DVD” in our article on making a bootable Lion- install drive. So if you plan to use that installer on other Macs, or—in this case—to create a bootable drive, be sure to copy the installer to another drive, or at least move it out of the Applications folder, before you install.

Intro: How to Install OS X Mountain Lion on Your PC With IAtkos. If you're interested in running Mac OS X, but you don't want to pay ridiculous prices for a normal. OS X Mountain Lion is available now as a download from the Mac App Store. Just click the Mac App Store icon in your dock, purchase Mountain Lion, and follow the. Contents > How can I download an old version of Mac OS X?

In the Windows’ analogy, this is like reformatting your Macbook or iMac and reinstalling a brand new version of Mac OS X Mountain Lion. Unfortunately in Mac the. If you plan on making an install drive but you already upgraded to Lion, you’ll need to. Virtualbox : This virtualization suite is free, and though it doesn't offer official support for Mac OS X, it works well enough. Mountain Lion bootable DVD. DiskMaker X (formerly Lion DiskMaker) is an application built with AppleScript that you can use with many versions of OS X/macOS to build a bootable drive from OS X.

If you don't, you'll have to re- download the installer from the Mac App Store before you can create a bootable install drive.). Get the latest version of the Mountain Lion installer. Before you make a bootable install drive, you should make sure you have the latest version of the Mountain Lion installer. You didn’t even realize there are different versions of the installer? It turns out that when you download the Mountain Lion installer from the Mac App Store, that copy of the installer installs whatever version of OS X was available at the time of download. For example, if you downloaded OS X 1.

Mountain Lion is released, you downloaded the 1. Which means that a bootable install drive you create from that installer will install OS X 1. For example, when the inevitable 1.

Mac App Store will begin providing an updated Mountain Lion installer that installs 1. Using an updated installer is convenient, because it means that if you ever need to re- install Mountain Lion, you won’t have to install 1. However, unlike with other Mac App Store- purchased software, the Mac App Store does not update the copy of the Mountain Lion installer app on your hard drive. If you’ve got an older version of the installer and you want the latest version, you must re- download Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store. If you create an install drive and later download an updated version of the Mountain Lion installer, updating your install drive means erasing it and repeating the procedure below. There’s a file inside the installer that indicates which version of OS X it will install, but getting to that file and viewing it is messy.

The easiest approach is to simply look at the Information box on the Mountain Lion page on the Mac App Store—specifically, check the date next to Updated. Then locate your downloaded copy of the Mountain Lion installer in the Finder, choose File - > Get Info, and look at the date next to Modified. If the Mac App Store date is newer than the Modified date on your copy of the installer, you need to re- download the installer to get the latest version. Free Download Program Madeline Classroom Companion 1St Amendment there. This means that if you make a bootable install drive right when Mountain Lion debuts, and then later buy a new Mac, your install drive won’t boot that Mac. However, as explained above, Apple regularly updates the Mountain Lion installer on the Mac App Store so that it installs the latest version of OS X 1.

If you create a new bootable installer using the first major update to Mountain Lion after your Mac was released, it should be able to boot all your Macs. So if you buy a new Mac post- Mountain Lion, and you haven’t purchased Mountain Lion for another Mac, you can’t download the Mountain Lion installer from the Mac App Store. For Lion, I explained how to create a bootable install drive for newer Macs. Once Apple starts shipping Macs with a Mountain Lion version of Internet Recovery, I’ll update that article to cover Mountain Lion. The latter is easier, but the former doesn’t require you to download third- party software. Follow Steps 1 through 4 in this slideshow to properly format the drive.

Here are the steps for using it to create your installer drive. Right- click (or Control+click) on the Mountain Lion installer to view its contents. Once you’ve purchased Mountain Lion, find the installer on your Mac.

It’s called Install OS X Mountain Lion. Applications folder (/Applications). Right- click (or Control+click) the installer, and choose Show Package Contents from the resulting contextual menu. In the folder that appears, open Contents, then open Shared Support; you’ll see a disk image file called Install. ESD. dmg. Launch Disk Utility.

Drag the Install. ESD. dmg disk image into the bottom (empty area) of Disk Utility’s sidebar (on the left). In Disk Utility, select Install. ESD. dmg in the sidebar, and then click the Open button in the toolbar to mount the disk image’s volume in the Finder. The mounted volume is called Mac OS X Install ESD, and it also appears below Install. ESD. dmg in Disk Utility. Select Mac OS X Install ESD in Disk Utility’s sidebar, then click the Restore button in the main part of the window.

Drag the Mac OS X Install ESD icon into the Source field on the right (if it isn’t already there). Connect to your Mac the properly formatted hard drive or flash drive you want to use for your bootable Mountain Lion installer. In Disk Utility, find this destination drive in the left- hand sidebar and then drag it into the Destination field on the right. As of version 1. 0. Lion installer, and continuing with the Mountain Lion installer, you must use the mounted Mac OS X Install ESD volume or you’ll get an error at the end of the restore procedure, and the newly created bootable drive may not function properly.). You can use Disk Utility's Restore screen to create a bootable flash drive or hard drive.

Using Carbon Copy Cloner Version 3. It’s called Install OS X Mountain Lion.

Applications folder (/Applications). Note that Carbon Copy Cloner requires that the installer be located in the Applications folder on your boot drive, which means that if you followed my advice to move the installer out of your Applications folder, you’ll have to move it back, at least temporarily. Connect to your Mac the properly formatted hard drive or flash drive you want to use for your bootable Mountain Lion installer. Launch Carbon Copy Cloner. In the Source pop- up menu (labeled Select A Source), choose Create a Mountain Lion Installer. Warning: The next step will effectively erase the destination drive or partition, so make sure it doesn’t contain any valuable data.

Click Clone, click Continue in the warning dialog that appears, and, when prompted, provide an administrator username and password. Carbon Copy Cloner can create a bootable Mountain Lion installer in a few easy steps. One difference here: Whereas using Disk Utility names your bootable drive Mac OS X Install ESD, using Carbon Copy Cloner keeps the drive’s original name. However, unlike recovery mode, your bootable installer includes the entire installer. He now has many, many bootable install drives.

Updated 1. 2: 1. 5 with new Disk Utility image.