Quick Tip: Create a Bootable Mountain Lion Flash Drive or DVD

Quick Tip: Create a Bootable Mountain Lion Flash Drive or DVD

on Aug 9th 2012 with 19 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Topics: Mountain Lion, Backup
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Estimated Completion Time: 60 Minutes
This entry is part 8 of 10 in the Mastering Mountain Lion Session
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When Apple made OS X 10.7 available through the Mac App Store, users who wanted restore media or simply didn’t have enough bandwidth to download the operating system could pay $70 for a Flash Drive that had a copy of OS X Lion preloaded. With the release of Mountain Lion, however, Apple has stopped selling the flash drives. Luckily, with the help of this Quick Tip, you’ll be able to make a Mountain Lion recovery flash drive on your own.

Why?

The first question you might be asking yourself is, “Why would I want to put OS X on a Flash Drive?” First, it provides peace of mind. If your hard drive crashes, you won’t be able to use Apple’s built-in recovery partition to install the OS, rendering you unable to install an operating system on your new hard drive.

Having recovery media for any computer is a great idea, as you never know when you’ll really need it.

A more common case, however, is that you might simply want to perform a clean-install of OS X 10.8, when you upgrade. Without recovery media like a Flash Drive or DVD, you won’t be able to format your hard drive and start from scratch. In addition, if you plan on selling your computer, you’ll need to wipe the hard drive and restore it in order to prevent the new owner from accessing your data. Having recovery media for any computer is a great idea, as you never know when you’ll really need it.

Before You Start

Before you begin the process of creating your restore media, here’s what you’ll need to do.

  • Get a  blank DVD or a Flash Drive/SD Card with at least 8GB of storage.
  • Make sure the Flash Drive doesn’t have any files you need on it; as it will be wiped during the process.
  • Download OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, but don’t install it. If you install the operating system, the installer file required to create the restore media will be deleted.
  • Download Lion DiskMaker, this is the tool we’ll use to create the restore media.
  • The process could take upwards of 45 minutes, so don’t get antsy and close the app or remove the DVD/Flash Drive.

Tutorial Screencast


Create a Bootable Mountain Lion Flash Drive or DVD

Conclusion

Now that you’ve got your restore media, you can rest easy knowing that no matter when you need it, you can restore your Mac to its factory default settings. I’ve got my restore disk tucked away, but the knowledge that I have it gives me some serious peace-of-mind.

Anyone who considers themselves more than just a basic Mac user will do well to have the recovery media lying around. If you’ve created OS X restore media, let us know how it went in the comments below!

 
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  • Kristian

    Couldn’t you do this with Disk Utility with a GUID Partition and restoring with the Mountain Lion disk image?

    I don’t know I haven’t tried it…

  • Phil

    Nice Tut… but to late for me. :-(

    I allreday Installed it. Can i somehow still do it? And what about users out side of the US?

    • http://mac.tutsplus.com Josh Johnson

      Check under “Purchases” in the App Store, I believe you can re-download the installer.

  • Anne

    Another way to create the install disc:
    http://eggfreckles.net/notes/installing-mountain-lion-clean/

    • Kristian

      Yeah, thats the way I was talking about!

      I did it for Lion.

  • Robbo

    Interesting but does anyone know if it’s possible to format a flash drive to BE THE BOOT DISK for a MacAir?
    Why? you ask;
    I’ve got lot’s of legacy stuff I cant do without that will only run with Snow Leopard so I need to be able to boot into Snow Leopard from time to time. (So I’d be happy to have Snow Leopard on the flash drive but I’ve been told you can’t do that.) (Or partition the drive if absolutely necessary if that were possible)

    Anybody got any insight into this?
    TIA

    • Johnny Winter

      What version of OS X did your MacBook Air originally ship with?

      Normally it would not be possible to load an earlier version of OS X than the one it shipped with, i.e. if it shipped with Lion it would not normally be possible to install Snow Leopard.

      Unfortunately, neither does it seem possible to run Snow Leopard in a virtual machine. It was possible to do this under VMware Fusion 4.1.0 ….but VMware has removed this particular download as running Snow Leopard in a Virtual Machine is against Apple’s licensing terms.

      If your MacBook Air originally shipped with Snow Leopard, then it should be possible to create a USB drive from which to run it. The way I’d do this would be to clone the machine.

      • Robbo

        Johnny,
        It did ship with Snow Leopard, (MacAir 2.13 core 3 Duo) so would I use Disk Utility to do this?

        Cloning the machine might make things complicated and I’d need a flash drive big enough to fit it all on. (currently 200G)
        All I really need is the Snow Leopard system sitting on a flash drive that I can access at boot to run the machine from that so I can run the legacy programs from time to time. (I have about 5000 files going back to the 1990′s that are too much work to convert)

        Thanks for you help

        • Johnny Winter

          Did your MacBook Air come with a couple of DVDs for reinstalling Snow Leopard? If so, you’ll need the external SuperDrive.

          There are two ways that I can think to tackle this.

          1. Plug in a portable USB HDD and install Snow Leopard to that. Disadvantage with this is that when you come to boot from a USB connected HDD, performance is very slow as it’s a lot of data to transfer over USB.

          2. Partition your MacBook Air’s SSD so that you can boot into either Lion or Snow Leopard. The disadvantage with this approach is that your SSD size is going to be fairly small which will limit the data that you can subsequently hold in either of the partitions, and you might end up duplicating some stuff?

          There’s a third way, perhaps. Off the top of my head, if the MBA has an SD card slot, you could install Snow Leopard on that and it _might_ be faster than USB – but you’ll need to check on that.

          The fourth way would be to revert the machine to Snow Leopard. I have written a tutorial on how to do this and it should be published here on MacTuts+ in the near future.

          Others may be able to suggest solutions I have not thought of?

          • Johnny Winter

            Ok, just trying proof of concept. It is possible to use Mountain Lion (or Lion) Disk Utility to copy OS X Snow Leopard DVD to a USB drive.

            It is also possible to install Snow Leopard from DVD or USB to an SD card, but the SD card is slow. You will need to check the System Profile of your machine to check the data bus speed for your SD card slot (if you have one?). It may be that the SDXC card will be better but I have not verified this. So, it may be better to install Snow Leopard to a portable USB hard drive and boot from that when you need to use Snow Leopard.

            To choose your boot disc when starting, hold down the Option key (marked ALT) immediately after the start up chime. Then select to boot from your portable hard drive.

          • Robbo

            Johnny,
            Thanks for all your comments,

            I’ve had no joy in trying to install snow leopard onto either a USB thumb drive or an SD card. (re your comments below, I wonder if it can’t be done. According to one apple tech I spoke to after mucking around for some time you can’t install it onto a thumb drive at least.(you can put the installer on a drive but not the system software that you would boot from.))

            I’m not interested in carrying around an external USB HDD, the advantages of Mountain Lion aren’t worth the effort IMO.

            So that leaves me with partitioning the 250G SSD in the Air.
            Currently I have 60G spare, so a final question:
            What would be the minimum size partition to have Snow Leopard working efficiently? ( I understand it would need to be significantly larger than just the size of the files involved.)

            I’ll then need to make the call as to whether I can live in that space.

            Thanks again for all your help.

          • Johnny Winter

            Robbo, thinking about it, I have only used USB drive to put installer on, I have not run a clone version of OS from USB drive, so thanks for clarifying it can’t be done that way.

            IIRC, a basic install of Snow Leopard is in the region of 8GB. Let’s say 10GB for a round number. So, a partition that allows for that and any necessary software that you want to run on Snow Leopard.

  • http://apps400.com karthick kumar aj

    Hi, My Mac ship with Mountain Lion, how can i create a booting disk ??

    • Johnny Winter

      I’ll be showing you this in a forthcoming article. In the meantime, your Mac has a ‘Recovery Partition’. This takes the place of the bootable USB drive.

      If you ever need to reinstall OS X or use Disk Utility to repair your drive then you can do this by pressing ⌘R immediately after the start-up chime.

      I’ll tell you all about this in another forthcoming articleon MactTuts+

  • mied95

    Hey Guys,
    On “http://blog.gete.net/lion-diskmaker-us/” is no option for Austrian (not Austrailian !!!:D) users. Has anyone an idea wheather I could use another version (it, us, …)?

    Thx

  • Nick

    I’m a little behind on updating. The USB boots up fine on my MBP (Lion), but when I try to boot to it on my iMac (Leopard) all I get after clicking the USB is a grey screen that has a circle with a line through it on it, then it shuts off. Any ideas?

    • C W

      Same, Macbook 2009.

  • Jack

    Once I use a bootable drive to install Mountain Lion on my other mac, how would updating the software work when new versions come out?!

  • bellizima

    How would I do a fresh install of Mountain Lion onto an new (upgraded) hard drive (using this new bootup drive)? I do not want to clone my existing drive to the new drive. I want a clean install of Mountain Lion.