by When hard-drive disaster strikes, you need to start up your Mac from another drive to repair it. In days gone by, you would typically boot from the install CD or DVD that came with your Mac (assuming you could recall where you stashed it) and run Apple’s Disk Utility from there. But today’s Macs no longer ship with any optical disc—heck, most Macs ship without any optical drive. So what do you do instead? Your best bet is to prepare ahead.
Create an emergency flash drive
An emergency drive contains only the essential software you need to boot your Mac and run troubleshooting utilities (such as Apple’s Disk Utility). I recommend using a USB flash drive (8GB is sufficient) rather than an optical disc. Flash drives are superior because they work with Macs that no longer contain an optical drive, and you can update them as necessary.
You can see the Repair Disk button, but you can’t click it. How do you solve this problem? It pays to prepare ahead.
The Recovery Disk Assistant method: One way to create your own emergency drive is via Apple’s Recovery Disk Assistant. This tool is simple to use, but requires that you already have a dedicated partition on your Mac’s hard drive called Recovery HD. If you installed Lion or Mountain Lion on a supported hard-drive configuration (your Mac must have an internal drive formatted with a GUID partition scheme), chances are good that it’s there.
You can check to see if you have the partition by restarting your Mac and then holding down Command-R. Or, restart while holding down the Option key. A screen should appear with Recovery HD as one of your options.
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