Make a Bootable USB Drive of OS X 10.

8 Mountain Lion from the Recovery Hard Drive

On every OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion there is a hidden partition to enable a method for Mountain Lion OS to be reinstalled on the machine, it is known as the Recovery Partition or drive and is 650mb in size. If you bought a new machine from Apple you have OS X 10.8 already installed but no back up disk! and since you havent bought the OSX Lion 10.8 App from the App store you cant re-download it so thats why you have the recovery drive as a partition in your main hard drive, to boot from it you need to restart the machine and when it starts to boot hold down command + r keys. From the Recovery Partition Hard Drivr you can run Disk Utility, access the command line, get online help and do a restore from a Time Machine backup and re-install Mountain Lion leaving all your other files intact it just replaces the core operating system. You can make a bootable USB drive or disk from the Recovery Partition 2 ways the easy way and on the Terminal

The Easy Way

1) Download OSX Recovery Disk Assistant and uncompress and launch it 2) Attach the USB drive that you want to copy the Recovery Partition to.

3) Select the drive and continue (All contents on it will be erased)

Thats it one external bootable Recovery Drive this works on both OSX 10.7 and 10.8

The Terminal Way

1) Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities and run: diskutil list The main drive in this list is No.2 with the Identifier of disk0s2, the boot Recovery HD drive is disk0s3

disk-util-list-drives We can also identify the Recovery drive by the name and the size set at 650mb 2) Mount the drive by its Identifier:

diskutil mount /dev/disk0s3 Output should be: Volume Recovery HD on /dev/disk0s3 mounted Now the Recovery HD is mounted in the Finder and you can see it in the sidebar under Devices Navigate to it from the sidebar Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot/BaseSystem.dmg

recovery-finder-osx-lion 3) Doubleclick BaseSystem.dmg to mount it also in the sidebar. This will mount the volume Mac OSX Base System

basesystem-recovery-drive

macosx-basesystem 4) Open Disk Utility in /Applications/Utilities 5) Put in a 2GB+ USB drive, let Disk Utility load it. The USB drive needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended Journaled, if its not, its time to format it in Disk Utility

usb-format-osx-extended-lion 6) Finally in still in Disk Utility, select the Restore tab - drag the mounted volume Mac OSX Base System into the Source field and drag the USB drive Volume (mine is called SuperBootUSBDrive) to the Destination.

restore-volume-osx-usb 7) Click Restore 10 minutes later One bootable USB drive Your bootable USB drive will be called Mac OS X Base System after the restore is complete. Now to boot from it just select it as the Start Up disk in System Preferences or hold down option key on boot and select it from the choice of bootable devices.

start-up-system-preference If you have downloaded the OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion App from the App Store then you can also make a full bootable image of OSX 10.8 to a disk/drive, you need to make the boot drive/disk before you install the Mountain Lion App, as the installer is deleted after running it. Thats why the guide here can get you out of trouble.

Update For Newer Models hidden BaseSystem.dmg - BaseSystem.chunklist

If you have the latest models from Apple that came already shipped with OSX 10.7, then you may not have the BaseSystem.dmg but instead see a BaseSystem.chunklist , the BaseSystem.dmg is there its just hidden. To show it so you can see it in the finder go to Terminal and after you have mounted the Recovery Drive: cd /Volumes/Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot sudo chflags nohidden BaseSystem.dmg Now it will be visible in the Finder. Related posts:

1. How to make a bootable OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion Disc or Drive from the downloaded Mountain Lion.app 2. Make a Bootable USB Drive from OS X Lion Using the Recovery Partition 3. How to make a bootable OSX 10.7 Lion Disc or Drive from the downloaded Lion.app 4. Easiest Way to Make an Image or USB bootable Copy of of OSX Lion 10.7 5. Reset Forgotten Admin Password OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion 6. Create an up to date image of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 Using InstaDMG 7. Is Yours Good Enough to take on the Mountain? 8. Disappearing Hard Disk Space on OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 9. Create an up to date image of OS X Lion 10.7 Using InstaDMG 10. How to get an iPhone out of Recovery Mode from iTunes