Mac 101: Building a bootable diagnostic and repair flash drive

December 2nd, 2009

More Mac 101, our tips and tricks for novice Mac users.

It’s a good idea to have a strategy in place in case of emergencies. If your hard drive tosses you errors, behaves badly or doesn’t even appear, what to do? If programs crash at random, you need to be ready. You can prepare for this by creating a bootable flash drive containing some diagnostic and repair utilities.

This is not meant to replace or in any way affect backing up your hard drive. Time Machine makes it so easy that not having a backup plan is just silly… but so much for the disclaimer.

To make a diagnostic and repair flash drive, I’d suggest buying an 8 GB flash drive, which can be had for around US $20 these days. When you get it, it probably won’t be formatted for your Macintosh, so plug it in and run Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities) to format the flash drive. In doing so, you have a number of choices. With your flash drive highlighted click on Erase and choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and give the flash drive a name. Then click on Erase on the bottom right side of the screen and in a few seconds your flash drive will be ready for an operating system.