Make a Bootable USB Drive OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Recovery
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Make a Bootable USB Drive of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion from the Recovery Hard Drive On every OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion there is a hidden partition to enable a method for Mountain Lion OS to be reinstalled on the machine, it is known as the Recovery Par- tition or drive and is 650mb in size. If you bought a new machine from Apple you have OS X 10.8 already installed – but no back up disk! and since you haven’t bought the OSX Lion 10.8 App from the App store you can’t re-download it – so thats why you have the recovery drive as a parti- tion in your main hard drive, to boot from it you need to restart the machine and when it starts to boot hold down “command” + “r” keys. From the Recovery Partition Hard Drivr you can run Disk Utility, access the com- mand line, get online help and do a restore from a Time Machine backup and re-in- stall Mountain Lion leaving all your other files intact – it just replaces the core oper- ating system. You can make a bootable USB drive or disk from the Recovery Partition 2 ways – the easy way and on the Terminal The Easy Way 1) Download OSX Recovery Disk Assistant and uncompress and launch it 2) Attach the USB drive that you want to copy the Recovery Partition to. 3) Select the drive and continue (All contents on it will be erased) That’s it one external bootable Recovery Drive – this works on both OSX 10.7 and 10.8 The Terminal Way 1) Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities and run: diskutil list The main drive in this list is No.2 with the “Identifier” of disk0s2, the boot Recovery HD drive is disk0s3 disk-util-list-drives We can also identify the Recovery drive by the name and the size – set at 650mb 2) Mount the drive by its Identifier: diskutil mount /dev/disk0s3 Output should be: Volume Recovery HD on /dev/disk0s3 mounted Now the Recovery HD is mounted in the Finder and you can see it in the sidebar un- der Devices Navigate to it from the sidebar – Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot/BaseSys- tem.dmg recovery-finder-osx-lion 3) Doubleclick BaseSystem.dmg to mount it also in the sidebar. This will mount the volume ” Mac OSX Base System” basesystem-recovery-drive macosx-basesystem 4) Open Disk Utility in /Applications/Utilities 5) Put in a 2GB+ USB drive, let Disk Utility load it. The USB drive needs to be format- ted as Mac OS Extended Journaled, if its not, its time to format it in Disk Utility… usb-format-osx-extended-lion 6) Finally in still in Disk Utility, select the “Restore” tab - drag the mounted volume “Mac OSX Base System” into the Source field and drag the USB drive “Volume” (mine is called SuperBootUSBDrive) to the Destination. restore-volume-osx-usb 7) Click Restore – 10 minutes later – One bootable USB drive Your bootable USB drive will be called “Mac OS X Base System” after the restore is complete. Now to boot from it just select it as the Start Up disk in System Preferences or hold down option key on boot and select it from the choice of bootable devices. start-up-system-preference If you have downloaded the OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion App from the App Store then you can also make a full bootable image of OSX 10.8 to a disk/drive, you need to make the boot drive/disk before you install the Mountain Lion App, as the installer is deleted after running it. That’s why the guide here can get you out of trouble. Update For Newer Models – hidden BaseSystem.dmg - BaseSystem.chun- klist If you have the latest models from Apple that came already shipped with OSX 10.7, then you may not have the “BaseSystem.dmg” but instead see a “BaseSystem.chun- klist” , the “BaseSystem.dmg” is there it’s just hidden. To show it so you can see it in the finder – go to Terminal – and after you have mounted the Recovery Drive: cd /Volumes/Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot sudo chflags nohidden BaseSystem.dmg Now it will be visible in the Finder. Related posts: 1. How to make a bootable OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion Disc or Drive from the down- loaded Mountain Lion.app 2. Make a Bootable USB Drive from OS X Lion Using the Recovery Partition 3. How to make a bootable OSX 10.7 Lion Disc or Drive from the downloaded Lion.app 4. Easiest Way to Make an Image or USB bootable Copy of of OSX Lion 10.7 5. Reset Forgotten Admin Password OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion 6. Create an up to date image of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 Using InstaDMG 7. Is Yours Good Enough to take on the Mountain? 8. Disappearing Hard Disk Space on OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 9. Create an up to date image of OS X Lion 10.7 Using InstaDMG 10. How to get an iPhone out of Recovery Mode from iTunes.