Like Lion (OS X 10.7) before it, Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) doesn’t ship on a disc—it’s available only as an installer app downloadable from the Mac App Store ...

A bootable Mac OS X thumb drive comes in handy when you need to troubleshoot OS issues for yourself, your family, or your friends. It’s also extremely useful for keeping your basic setup consistent ...

Having bootable media ready can be a real lifesaver when you need to do a clean installation of Windows. Thankfully, it's easy to set that up. There are two main ways to create bootable media for a ...

Want to try or install a Linux distribution (distro) on your computer? Making a bootable flash drive with an image of the distro is the simplest route these days. I've done it dozens of times, and ...

Apple makes it harder to make an external boot drive for your Mac than it has in the past, but sometimes you still need to do it. Here's how to do it in macOS Sequoia. Apple Silicon and macOS may be ...

We all need to start from scratch sometimes and if you're building a new PC, chances are you'll need to learn how to make a bootable USB drive. This will enable you to boot your PC directly from a USB ...

Creating a bootable macOS Catalina USB install drive is an effective way to generate a clean installation of macOS on your Mac. This hands-on tutorial will work with both the macOS Catalina developer ...

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Even with the rise of cloud storage, the USB flash drive is still vital ...

While I understand the utility of a USB installer, it should be mentioned that macOS Internet recovery has been around since Lion. You can choose to install latest ...

Windows XP takes up relatively little space on a hard drive and uses fewer system resources than recent versions of Windows. For computers with limited memory and processing power as well as no ...

You can still make an external macOS bootable drive, but Apple's tighter security procedures mean you have to prepare for it before your internal drive fails. Here's how to do it all, and what's been ...

[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Lion (OS X 10.7). We also have a complete guide to installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).] ...