An optical disc (CD, DVD) or USB drive that contains a bootable program that takes control of the computer. Computers are typically configured to look for the OS on a CD or DVD first and then the hard ...

Boot disk recovery and repair toolkits don’t get any better than this Windows-based environment. Finally, we come to a boot disc that offers useful tools, is easyto use, and can be created from ...

It seems that the SD card slot in the new MacBook Pros does count as a bootable device; all you have to do is install OS X onto a card, set it as the default boot device, and you’re good to go. Why ...

Accessing the boot menu in OS X is a simple key press, though in some cases it requires specific timing in order to work. Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author ...

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 ...

[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Lion (OS X 10.7). We also have a complete guide to installing and upgrading to Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).] ...

Using a Windows XP upgrade CD The Boot Camp installation instructions claim that a valid full Windows XP SP2 disc is required and that upgrade discs cannot be used ...

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 ...

Mavericks (OS X 10.9) doesn’t ship on a disc. Instead, it’s available only as an installer app downloadable from the Mac App Store, and that installer doesn’t ...

I recently bought a new 1 TB NVMe SSD (970 Evo Plus) to upgrade from my current 256 GB M.2 SATA SSD. The current disk is LUKS encrypted using the default options were when I originally installed ...