How can I tell if a drive can be used to boot from? For ages I couldn't work out why my P133 machine wouldn't boot of CDs even when the option was checked in the BIOS. Then I realised it was the drive ...

In last month's column, I described the hurdles that Mac OS X puts in your way when you try to create a bootable disc, especially a custom bootable CD, DVD or flash drive. I offered various solutions ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Like Lion (OS X 10.7) before it, Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) doesn’t ship on a disc—it’s available only as an installer app downloadable from the Mac App Store ...

[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).] ...

Windows XP takes up relatively little space on a hard drive and uses fewer system resources than recent versions of Windows. For computers with limited memory and processing power as well as no ...