How To Create Boot Drive For Mac

Insert the USB drive into the Mac and launch Disk Utility. Click on the USB drive from the left-hand menu and select the Partition tab.

[Editor's note: This article is part of our.] This article is for people whose Macs came preinstalled with Mavericks. If you can download the Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store, you should instead use. A nice feature of recent OS X versions is. If you ever have system or drive issues, OS X Recovery lets you boot your Mac into a special recovery mode to check or repair your hard drive, browse the Web for troubleshooting help, restore your drive from a backup, or even reinstall OS X itself. (See our OS X Recovery is a convenient feature that, in theory, means you no longer need an OS X Install disc or a bootable external hard drive with the OS X installer. But there are still good reasons to have one.

For example, if you want to install Mavericks (OS X 10.9) on multiple Macs, a bootable installer drive is faster and more convenient than downloading or copying the entire OS X installer to each computer. But even for troubleshooting, a bootable installer drive has advantages over OS X Recovery. For starters, OS X Recovery doesn’t include the full Mavericks installer—it requires you to download over 5GB of data before you can reinstall OS X 10.9—whereas a bootable installer drive contains all the necessary data, making installation much, much faster. And if you’ve got a Mac that doesn’t support OS X Internet Recovery—a variation of OS X Recovery that loads over the Internet and requires special firmware—recovery mode may not even be available if your Mac’s drive itself is having problems.

(OS X Internet Recovery is available on mid-2011-or-later Macs, as well as some older Macs that have received.) A bootable installer drive, on the other hand, will always be there for you. The problem for newer Macs If you purchased OS X 10.9 from the Mac App Store, from the Mac App Store version of Mavericks is relatively simple. However, if you have a Mac that debuted after Mavericks was released in October 2013, your Mac shipped with Mavericks pre-installed, so you don’t have an easily downloadable version of the installer—unless you happened to purchase Mavericks for another, older Mac.

This means you can’t use our. (Note that Apple offers a, which I. However, like the standard OS X Recovery feature, this drive requires you to download the full 5GB+ of OS X each time you want to install.

So it's hard to find ones that still work with recent versions of the MacOS. Newsgroup reader for mac. Check out: Unison (free, but no support or updates) SeaMonkey (free, a suite of Internet tools) SABnzbd (free) Nzbvortex ($10).

So it’s better to have the full installer on a bootable drive.) Fortunately, it’s possible to create a bootable Mavericks installer drive even if your only Mac is a model that shipped with Mavericks—although doing so requires a bit more work than if you had purchased the Mac App Store version. IMPORTANT: To reiterate, if you've downloaded Mavericks from the Mac App Store (for any other Mac you own), so you’re able to download the Mac App Store version of the Mavericks installer, you don’t need to use the procedure in this article. You can instead use. As long as you download the latest version of the Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store—instructions are provided in that tutorial—you’ll have a bootable Mavericks installer that should work with every Mavericks-compatible Mac.

The solution for newer Macs When you use OS X Internet Recovery to reinstall Mavericks, your Mac contacts Apple’s servers, identifies itself, and requests the appropriate Mavericks-installer data. Apple’s servers verify the Mac model and then, assuming it’s a Mac compatible with OS X Internet Recovery, provide the roughly 5GB of installer data for download. Once that data has been downloaded, OS X Recovery restarts your Mac, immediately installs the OS, and then deletes the installer data. The trick you need to perform is to interrupt that process—safely—so that you can grab the installer data and keep it. Here are the steps to take: The OS X Utilities window you see when you boot into OS X Recovery and OS X Internet Recovery • Boot into recovery mode by holding down Command+R at startup; you’ll eventually see an OS X Utilities window.

• Connect a drive—a hard drive, a thumb drive, or the like—with at least 12GB of free space. (The drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended [Journaled], and must have a GUID Partition Table. Follow to properly format the drive, if necessary.) • In the OS X Utilities window, select Reinstall OS X and then click Continue. • On the OS X Mavericks screen, click Continue. You’ll see the message, “To download and restore OS X, your computer’s eligibility will be verified with Apple.” Click Continue, then click Agree (twice) on the next screen to agree to the license agreement. • Select the drive onto which you want to “install” Mavericks. The important thing here is to select your external drive, not your Mac’s drive.