

For situations like this, you need an emergency drive on hand to start up your computer and troubleshoot the problem.Įmergency USB Drive: Creating a bootable USB drive is your safest bet.

First your computer starts freezing infrequently, then crashing more often, and then it won’t start at all. It can happen to any of us, even those who own brand-new Macs. You’ll thank yourself for taking the time to complete this project. Carry it in your pocket or put it on your keychain so it’s available if the worst-case scenario occurs. What’s a maintenance-minded Mac user to do?Ĭreate your own bootable OS X USB drive, of course! It’s easy, and if you’ve already purchased OS X and have a USB drive that’s 1 GB or larger, it’s completely free. But OS X Mountain Lion is sold in the App Store as a digital download - no physical disk is provided. With previous versions of OS X, you could have used the installation DVD to fix problems. An emergency drive (also referred to as an OS X Recovery Disk) can help you repair the hard disk, reinstall the operating system, and restore from a Time Machine backup to get your computer back fast. It’s a good idea to have a bootable emergency drive on hand, just in case disaster strikes your Mac. $ grep -A 1 -i productversion /Volumes/Recovery\ HD//SystemVersion.AirPort Apple Apps Backups Developer Education Email Hardware Internet iPad iPhone Mac Music Network Photos Security TV Weekend Wonk Volume Recovery HD on /dev/disk0s3 mounted We can now simply mount that partition and find out which OS X version is installed there. The important one here is the third partition of the first disk. This will produce output which can look like this:Ģ: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 499.2 GB disk0s2ģ: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3 To check for any Recovery HD, open Terminal ( enter 'Terminal' in a Spotlight-search and you'll see the application listed) and enter the following command: Since you can have such a partition on each attached Mac-formatted disk, it's interesting to know if they are all up-to-date. There is an easy way to check which version of Mac OS X is on the Recovery HD partitions. Identify the MacOS X version on your Recovery HD partition
