How to create Mountain Lion 10.8 bootable USB Flash Drive

**Sunondo** · 25-07-2012

I will be installing Mountain Lion 10.8 today as my mac is qualifying all the criteria and requirement that it needs. Anyways I have wanted to know the method of making a bootable USB Flash Drive with it so that I can use it in some of my other mac system as well. Since it has been released today I wanted to know if anyone has tried that out or has an idea regarding how to do it?? Help regarding this will be appreciated.

**Steinbach** · 25-07-2012

Hey in that case you can try to make Bootable USB Drive of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion from the Recovery Hard Drive. If you have a mac that came installed with OS X 10.8 or if you have downloaded and installed it form App store then there will be a recovery drive as a partition in your main hard drive. For booting from recovery drive you just have to restart the machine and hold down “command” + “r” keys at the same time while it boots. Once you enter the recovery mode you will be able to access command line , run Disk Utility, get online help, backup and re-install Mountain Lion etc. Anyways for making a making a bootable USB drive from Recovery Partition you have to follow the below simple steps:

First Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities and run the below command:
diskutil list
Now check out for Recovery drive in the list and mount the drive by its Identifier using the below command:
diskutil mount /dev/disk0s3
Once the Recovery HD gets mounted you will be able to see it in the sidebar under Devices in the Finder, so just Navigate to Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot/BaseSystem.dmg and Doubleclick on “BaseSystem.dmg” for mounting it in the sidebar.
When” Mac OSX Base System” volume gets mounted then Open Disk Utility which will be in /Applications/Utilities and connect your USB drive.
After your driver gets loaded in Disk Utility then you will have to format the same as “Mac OS Extended Journaled”. Now after formatting it select the “Restore” tab in Disk Utility and drag “Mac OSX Base System” into source field and Volume in Destination accordingly and click on Restore.

When the process gets over you will be having a bootable USB drive named Mac OS X Base System. So from now, if you want to boot from your bootable USB drive than select it as Start Up disk in System Preferences and select it from the available bootable devices. You can also select it by holding down option key on boot as well.

**Gyan|dada** · 25-07-2012

If you want then you can try using an application called Lion Disk Maker, it is an application that has been programmed with AppleScript and it can be used for creating bootable drive or for burning a DVD from Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7 as well as OS X 10.8 using OS X Mountain Lion Installation program. You don’t have to go through a number of steps rather you just have to download and launch the applications. Once it is launched it will automatically find out the OS X Install program and will ask you for creating a bootable drive or for burning a DVD.

For burning DVD you will need to have a SuperDrive along with a writable DVD, whereas for a bootable disk you just need to have a USB drive having minimum 8 GB of storage. I also wanted to add that make sure that you are taking a backup of the usb drive or other volume that you might be using for creating a bootable drive as they will get erased.

You can download Lion Disk Maker, from here if you face any issues with this program then you can ask you queries here, I will surely try to help you with a possible fix for it, best of luck.