In order to perform this procedure, you will need an external FireWire hard drive, as well as copies of Mac OS X for both Intel-based and PowerPC-based Macs. You will also need access to both an Intel ...

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 ...

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 ...

Like the old-fangled BIOS (which is slowly being phased out with the help of EFI), the DOS operating system is a piece of computing history that refuses to be only history. While most folks will never ...

Have a USB boot drive handy should you ever need to reinstall Windows 10 on your PC. You can troubleshoot an old PC at your home. In addition to common issues to look for, there's another task you ...

Having a secondary boot volume is almost a necessity for troubleshooting some problems with Macs. Here are some options for creating boot disks. Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has ...

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 ...

For a long time, Microsoft didn’t sell Windows install media in the form of bootable USB flash drives. Instead, it prefered to stick to old-school DVD media, despite the fact that many notebooks today ...

Happy Mountain Lion Day! Now that you have downloaded the 4.34GB installer, you may want to install Mountain Lion on more than one of your personal machines. Do you really need to wait 45 minutes or ...

At startup, the Windows XP boot loader, NTLDR, reads the information stored to the boot.ini file to determine which operating systems the computer can boot from and uses this data to create a boot ...

Because of an upcoming job interview (yes, I am still looking, unsuccessfully), I wanted to set up a system with openSolaris and perhaps CentOS. As long as I was doing that, I decided to set up a few ...