In addition, it brought with it the innovative feature called Recovery. Lion set up a secret recovery area on your hard drive so if you needed to reinstall Lion, you could boot up your Mac while holding down ⌘R When Lion was released, it was Apple’s first OS that required no installation media, you just download and intall it. A Full Installer for OS X Mountain Lionīefore Lion, if you ever needed to do a reinstall of OS X, you had to have your installation DVDs handy. Let’s quickly go over each of these services that our drive will do. Some simple but useful utilities to resurrect a troublesome Mac.A standard installation of OS X Mountain Lion.A full installer for OS X Mountain Lion.Once set up, our diagnostic drive will contain the following: The built-in hard drive is reporting errors and you need to recover data, fast!.You installed a driver and now your Mac kernel panics when you try to log in.

A software update crashed, leaving us without a bootable Mac.What is a Diagnostic Drive?Įssentially, it’s an external hard drive that you set up so that you can recover from different scenarios where your beloved Mac could go wrong. Having a diagnostic drive available is something that we all should have. In this tutorial, we’ll be setting up an old external USB drive with some essential software to allow us to boot, fix and reinstall software on a Mac. Mac not booting? Software update went wrong? Need to do a reinstall? These are just some of the reasons why having a diagnostic drive available is something that we all should have (in addition to a good backup strategy, of course).

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