How to create 'Mountain Lion' Bootable USB Drive

[Maq.H]

As we stated earlier in review here Apple OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview Mountain Lion will be available for customers later in summer, at present it is only available for Developers and tester. But when it will release later in summer, many users among may require to make bootable disk or bootable USB drive for the same.

If you have question in your mind...why to make Bootable Drive, it is because with the help of Bootable drives, you can do a clean install of New Mountain lion, or you can install it easily on separate partitions. Additionally, bootable drive will even help you to install new OS X 10.8 Macs computers that are Offline (without internet connections). So below are the steps by step process that will help you for creating Bootable USB Drive.

First make sure you meet the system requirements for Mountain Lion:

• 64-Bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better required
• Capability to boot into OS X 64-bit kernel
• Advanced GPU chipset required
• And obviously Internet connection in order to download and install OS X 10.8.

For more information on System Requirements, check out this: System requirements for OS X Mountain Lion?

Now follow the steps to create the Bootable Mountain Lion Flash Drive:

• Launch your web browser and download OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion from here.
  
  
• Now go to Applications > directory. Right-click on ‘Install Mac OS X Mountain Lion.app’ selecting ‘Show Package Contents’.
  
  
• Open the directory named ‘Contents’, now open ‘SharedSupport, and Double click the file named as ‘InstallESD.dmg’ in order to mount it to desktop.
  
  
• Now Launch Disk utility and connect a USB drive with the system.
  
  
• In the left menu bar, select your USB/External drive and click on “Erase” tab.
  
  
• Choose ‘Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)’ option from the format menu and click on ‘Erase’ button at the bottom.
  
  
  
  
  
• Now again click on your formatted USB drive from the left bar and click on the ‘Restore’ tab.
  
  
• Now drag the earlier mounted ‘Mac OS X Install ESD’ image into the field named as ‘Source’.
  
  
• Similarly drag your formatted drive to the ‘Destination’ field and click on ‘Restore’ at bottom.
  
  
  
  
  
• You will get a prompt for Admin Password to confirm that the USB drive will lose it’s data. Enter Password and move on.

[Maq.H]

That’s it. Now Disk Utility will do the rest of part and will generate a bootable drive out of USB drive for your Mountain Lion using the disk image. Keep patience cause this is going to take about half an hour. Once it is done, reboot the system. Remember to hold the OPTION key at the startup to bring up the Boot Menu.

You need to select the External Drive from the Boot Option to make your system boot into the Mountain Lion installer. You will get a Screen stating “To set up the installation of OS X Mountain Lion, click Continue” as shown in the image below:

Here click on Continue and follow the steps normally as you do while installing other Mac OS.