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 ...

[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).] ...

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 ...

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 ...

Apple hasn’t shipped operating systems on physical media in almost a decade, but there are still good reasons to want a reliable old USB stick for macOS Mojave. Luckily, it’s not hard to make ...

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 our standard instructions for ...

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 ...

I need to update the firmware of the DVD drive in my laptop (Thinkpad T30 2366-92U); to do this I have to boot in DOS and run the firmware update. The catch-22 is that my DVD and floppy drive can't ...

Rufus is a free, portable utility that creates bootable USB flash drives from ISO files. As of 2026, the latest version is Rufus 4.13 — and it’s faster and more capable than ever, with built-in ...

Non-existent. To create a bootable optical disc (or, similarly, a bootable Zip or floppy disk) was a bit more involved, but not by much. So how does all of this compare to the situation with Mac OS X ...