Having a secondary boot volume is almost a necessity for troubleshooting some problems with Macs. Here are some options for creating boot disks. Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has ...

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 ...

Back in the old days of 2010, I used to walk into my home office in the morning, hit the power button on my production system, and then head back upstairs to have breakfast. By the time I returned to ...

Have a USB boot drive handy should you ever need to reinstall Windows 10 on your PC. You can troubleshoot an old PC at your home. In addition to common issues to look for, there's another task you ...

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 ...

At startup, the Windows XP boot loader, NTLDR, reads the information stored to the boot.ini file to determine which operating systems the computer can boot from and uses this data to create a boot ...

PSA: for MOST use cases there is now a much easier solution. If your primary goal is just to download updates faster/not use up your limited data budget, and you have multiple Macs (otherwise why do ...

When something goes wrong with your Mac, it's a boon to have a separate, external drive that you can work from — but Apple no longer makes that easy. Here's how to do it. The short answer to how you ...