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 ...

I recently said that an MS-DOS boot disk couldn’t be created in Windows 2000. As several readers pointed out, this isn’t quite true. An MS-DOS boot disk can be created using files located on the ...

If you ever need to partition or edit the partitions on your hard drives without an existing OS on the computer, then GParted Live should be in your PC toolbox. The free GParted Live is based on a ...

It's easy to make boot disks on old Macs for older hardware, but as the years have gone on, it's gotten a little more difficult. Here's how to make classic Mac OS 9 and early Mac OS X boot media on ...

Here is a question from reader Danny. “I have XP Pro installed at the moment and I would like to format my hard drive so that I can install 2000. Apart from hooking my drive up as a slave to another ...

When your PC stops booting, a boot drive is the electronic version of a defibrillator. If you can boot your PC, you can detect bad memory, chase bad sectors, change passwords, and recover data … all ...

When you’re troubleshooting your computer or installing a new operating system, you may need to “boot from a disc” or USB device (like an external hard drive or flash drive). Here’s what that ...

The computer didn't come with a restore disk, so I resorted to downloading one from BitTorrent. After all, whether or not the operating system disk is legitimate, I have a valid serial number. However ...