Mac Hacks

Chapter 2. Mountain Lion Hacks

Mountain Lion is OS X version 10.8. If you count the public beta version, that’s ten iterations of OS X—and it still isn’t perfect! That shouldn’t be surprising; there are millions of people who use OS X and each one of them is going to want it to behave slightly differently. Apple provides preferences that let you personalize a lot of settings, but sometimes you need to go beyond what Apple provides to get Mountain Lion running the way you want it. This chapter teaches you how to get things just so.

Hack 8. Copy the Mountain Lion Installer to a Flash Drive

Making a portable copy of the Mountain Lion installer means you’ll never need to spend time downloading it again. And there are many other benefits of having a bootable copy of the Mountain Lion installer on hand, as this hack explains.

Note: This hack describes copying the Mountain Lion installer to a flash drive, but this technique also works for the Lion installer, and you can use any storage media you wish. If you’re using an older version of OS X than Lion, chances are your Mac came bundled with an emergency boot disk—the install DVD that shipped with your Mac (it’s round, silver, and labeled “OS X Install”).

The most obvious reason for having a copy of the installer on a flash drive is that it saves you from downloading 4 GBs of data for every Mac you want to install Mountain Lion on. Which means this is a must-have hack for people with multiple Macs, but not an important hack for those with just ...