How to Create a Bootable Mountain Lion USB Flash Drive If you have a Mac with only USB 2 ports, its’ probably safer to go with a USB 2 Flash Drive. Note: Not all Macs can boot from USB 3 Flash Drives/Not all USB 3 Flash Drives are bootable. Since my MacBook Pro and MacBook Air have USB 3.0 ports I decided to go with USB 3.0 Thumb Drives to speed up the process and future installations. Unfortunately Mountain Lion takes a bit more than 4GB, so you’re gonna need at least an 8GB Thumb Drive. You’re also gonna need a USB thumb/flash drive. You may need to redownload it from the Mac App Store: You’re gonna need the Mountain Lion installer. Apple used to make it kinda easy to create a bootable disc, but for some reason with Mountain Lion Apple no longer provides to utility to automate this process. When you install it on a Mac you need to be able to boot from an external disc especially if you want to reformat the hard drive or do repairs with Disk Utility. As we all know there are times when you may need to reinstall Mac OS X, install it on a fresh system or external hard drive. That’s great as long as your Mac is working properly and online. To get Mountain Lion (Mac OS X 10.8) you buy it online from Mac App Store, download and install it. Select the drive in Disk Utility and then thePartition Tab.Long gone are the days where Apple sells Mac OS X on discs. In Disk Utility, prepare the USB drive to be bootable.Plugin your USB Drive, for this effort I used a 8gb USB drive, and open Disk Utility.You will need this file to create the USB drive. In the Finder window displaying the package contents select the Contents folder, then the SharedSupport folder.Find the downloaded App package in Finder, right or control click it and select “Show Package Contents”.

How To Create an OS X Lion USB Installation Drive

Below you will find the steps to install OS X Lion via a USB drive. In fact, it is still very easy to create a USB installation disk for OS X Lion. Starting with OS X Lion, the only way to get new software will be to download and install it through the Mac App store.įortunately, it does not appear that Apple has limited our ability to create our own installation media for OS X installations. No longer would you be able to buy the latest and greatest software from Apple on DVDs or other media. When Apple announced at their World Wide Developers Conference the release of OS X Lion, they shared that they were moving forward with a new way to distribute software to their customers.

Mountain lion usb bootable