How To Create A Boot Disk

Question

How To Create A Boot Disk

I am somewhat new to Mac and am trying to create some sort of boot disk. I am having OS/hard drive problems so I ran a "Verify Disk" ("Disk Repair" was unavailable), and it returned the message that the disk must be repaired, and that I should start up my computer from another disk then run a "Repair Disk" on my hard drive. Can I not insert a blank DVD and burn a boot disk to it, like one would to create a Windows boot disk? If not, how can I boot from another disk, so I can run a "Repair Disk" on my hard drive? (I do not have an external drive with sufficient space to hold the Snow Leopard OS files and I am reading that others are having problems booting from such drives).

Posted on Oct 29, 2011 8:53 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Noble Seven

Level 4

2,781 points

Oct 29, 2011 8:55 PM in response to gearjamminsob

You could try booting from the Snow Leopard install CD if you still have it, and you might be able to run "Repair Disk" from the Utilities available in the install disc.

I've never done it before so I wouldn't know, but it's worth a shot if you still have the install cd.

Reply

Answer 2

steve359

Level 6

17,169 points

Oct 29, 2011 9:03 PM in response to Noble Seven

Wrong respond to ... should be the original poster ... sorry

My backup strategy and the reasons why:

Two external hard disks, both 2x my startup disk, both self powered:

One has CarbonCopyClone (free downloadable from the net) makes a bit-by-bit clone of the startup disk, including all of the low-level formatting that allows it to be bootable. This I update once per week, because I like to to have my system relatively quiet to get a good snapshot.
One TimeMachine. This is file-level, and is NOT bootable. But it backs up one file at a time, so is lower "profile" and can run run while I am working.

When I need to (and I have done this once already just to prove it) I can power-up my system with the "option" key pressed, and I can select the CCC disk for booting.

That gives me a fully functional system to repair my main system disk "offline". Also I can clone the CCC disk back to the main disk (be it a repaired original or a newly formatted replacement).

Reply

Answer 3

X423424X

Level 6

14,265 points

Oct 29, 2011 10:20 PM in response to gearjamminsob

Just insert your installer DVD (the one that came with your computer) and run Disk Utility from that to repair your drive.

The reason you could only verify and not repair when running DU from your boot drive is you cannot repair the boot drive while booted from it. Hence the requirement of booting from a different disk . A DVD is a disk, and the installer DVD is already a bootable disk. So no need to create one of your own (other than cloning the DVD as a backup of course).

And as steve359 says, yes, you should have backups. Using popular backup utilities like Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper to make bootable backups is convenient and of course you then have backups of your main drive in case it catastrophically fails.

Oh, and to answer the specific exact question of the title of this thread ("Re: How To Create A Boot Disk"), sort of tangential to the problem at hand, get yourself a small disk (even, say about 16GB to 32GB usb flash drive will do) and install the system on it (probably custom install to avoid needless crap). In the case of a usb flash drive, it won't be any speed daemon, but if that's all you got in some emergency, who cares? 😉

Reply

Answer 4

Oct 30, 2011 9:31 AM in response to Noble Seven

Thanks for the replies all but I still can't boot from other than the hard drive. I bought the machine about a year and a half ago and didn't recall receiving any removable media so I was thinking, as was the case with on PC I purchased, people had to buy their own blank media and create a boot disk. I found the disk containig the Snow Leopard files but when I put it in the drive and power off and back on, it boots to the hard drive. With Windows I would go into the BIOS and put the CD drive at the top of the boot sequence to have the machine boot from a bootable disk in a CD/DVD drive; how do I accomplish this with OS X 6? I mean I assume I have to get into the BIOS and change the boot sequence, but then my question is how do you do this with modern Mac OS's? Hold down "F1" while booting, just like Windows?

Reply

Answer 5

Oct 30, 2011 10:08 AM in response to gearjamminsob

I have been trying to edit (or delete) my last post in this thread, and to mark it as solved, but I can't see a way to do so. I found the boot disk and figured out how to change the boot sequence, and as far as I can tell the problems I had are no more. Thanks again for the replies.

Mark

Reply