When some problems such as hard drive corruption occur on your Mac, or if you need to perform account maintenance such as resetting passwords or fixing account permissions, then you will need to use the tools that Apple includes on the hidden Recovery drive that is part of OS X. However, in some cases such as for RAID arrays, you may not have a recovery partition, in which case there are several alternatives you can use, even if you are limited by your internet connection: Continue reading
Tag Archives: Recovery Mode
Four methods for accessing recovery mode in OS X
Accessing Recovery Mode in OS X may be necessary for restoring from a backup, and reinstalling OS X, among other low-level administrative tasks. In most cases, your Mac will have a local recovery partition based on the current OS X installation, that you can access; however, there may be instances where this will not work. For those who need to access Recovery Mode for a particular Mac, here are all of the way to go about doing this. Continue reading
Tackle your Mac booting to a gray screen
Given the efficiency and convenience of sleep mode on Mac systems, it is often a rarity that we end up restarting our Macs. When we do, we expect it to boot to normal operation; however, sometimes a snafu may result in your Mac booting to a gray screen, and no further. Often such behavior happens because of a specific problem, such as a power outage, or the installation of a new software package, but regardless, if it happens there are essentially only a few things that you can do. Continue reading
From the forums: Create a boot disk from the OS X installer
Starting with Lion, OS X has been distributed almost exclusively online through the App Store, or if you need to wipe your system and reinstall, then the installer can be accessed through Recovery Mode.
While these approaches should work just fine, sometimes it might be impractical, such as when you need to install to more than a couple of systems. In these situations, each system will need to download the installation files, which can take a very long time, especially if your bandwidth is somewhat limited. Continue reading
How to reinstall OS X
Generally a reinstallation of your operating system is a last-resort option, but while recommended as such, there are times when problems warrant a reinstall. For instance, if your OS has been damaged by malware or a problematic third-party application, or if after updating you find a required program you use is not functioning properly, then you can perform a reinstallation to fix your OS, or roll back the version that works with your programs. Continue reading
How to access Recovery Mode in OS X
Recovery mode in OS X is a special boot options that allows you to run repair and reinstallation tools for your system, in addition to setting a firmware password, if needed.
Through the development of OS X, these tools have been provided in several different forms, and subsequently several different approaches for loading them. Continue reading