I know this is stating the obvious for anyone experienced with hosting, and yet, you'd be surprised just how many people put it off, and that's not even counting those who simply don't know better.

When your PC stops booting, a boot drive is the electronic version of a defibrillator. If you can boot your PC, you can detect bad memory, chase bad sectors, change passwords, and recover data … all ...

Flash drives are convenient for making backups of files as well as copying data from one computer to another. These small memory devices are portable and only require ...

This article is for people whose Macs came preinstalled with Mavericks. If you can download the Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store, you should instead use our standard instructions for ...

If you have bought an Apple Silicon Mac or MacBook but need to upgrade your storage without buying a brand new device, you can set up your Mac to run from an external drive. Here's how to boot macOS ...

Bootable hard drives. Creating a bootable hard drive in Mac OS X is not difficult, but is still a significant undertaking. The most common method is to boot from a Mac OS X Install disc, run the ...

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 ...

Apple only sells OS X Mountain Lion as a digital download in the Mac App Store. The installer weighs in at a hefty 4.05GB, but the good news is that you can install your copy of Mountain Lion on all ...

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 ...

How can I tell if a drive can be used to boot from? For ages I couldn't work out why my P133 machine wouldn't boot of CDs even when the option was checked in the BIOS. Then I realised it was the drive ...

Connecting an external hard drive to a computer before turning on the system can confuse the device when loading the operating system. When a computer hangs after the BIOS splash screen while being ...

In last month's column, I described the hurdles that Mac OS X puts in your way when you try to create a bootable disc, especially a custom bootable CD, DVD or flash drive. I offered various solutions ...