OS X can start up your Mac in a myriad of ways, some of which our ongoing tutorial series has discussed already in detail such as using built-in Startup Manager to pick a disk to startup your Mac from and booting into Safe, Verbose and Target Disk modes. How To: Copy a data disk uing one optical drive using disk utility on OS X How To: Format an external hard drive for Mac OS X How To: Create a Portable, Fully Functional USB Version of Windows 8.

The most current version of OS X is OS X 10.9 Mavericks. OS X Mavericks is available as a free download from the Mac App Store. If you need to purchase Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard you may order it from this page.

Step 1: Back Up Your Files! Okay, so you may have a lot of files that you want to get rid of, but you definitely have some files you want to keep. In my case, I even have programs I want to keep so I don't have to re-download them after the process is over. Use a writable CD/DVD, a, or any of the multitude of cloud options to keep your important files backed up.

Techie yard sales/Macintosh user groups You’ll have to dig around and pen them into your calendar, but you’ll find what you need here plus Mac-based advice and camaraderie to boot. Growing up in the 1990s, Macintosh User Group techie yard sales were among the greatest things on Earth and allowed you to find almost any piece of hardware or software that you might need. This tradition continues and Apple still keeps a list of physical as well as online-only, so see what’s near you. Once your older Mac OS X CD or DVD is in your hand, set aside some time with Disk Utility and some blank CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, or, in the case of the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating systems, dual layer DVD-Rs.

Accessing The Recovery Partition The Lion installer set up and configured the recovery partition on the test computer which had the appropriate GUID partition. However, the recovery partition can only be accessed via the EFI firmware. You access it by pressing and holding the option button while restarting or turning your computer on. You then select it as the drive you wish to boot from. Contacting the Apple Mothership Once the recovery partition has booted it offers an option to reinstall Mac OS X, but in order for it to work correctly you’ll need an internet connection because the process requires access to servers at Apple that validate the installation.

Your Mac doesn’t waste time loading all those icons and junk, just Just clean it, please. Empty out the Trash (No, we’re not joking) Seriously: It may sound incredibly basic, but it could free up a surprising amount of space.

• Hold Command (⌘) + Option + 'p' + 'r' during startup. This zaps the (Parameter RAM), an option that long-time Mac users will remember. Press and hold the key combination until you hear the second set of chimes.

By The bootable Mac OS X Snow Leopard Install DVD-ROM is important if your Mac ever refuses to boot like normal. If you don’t have a bootable DVD-ROM — preferably a Mac OS X Snow Leopard Install DVD-ROM — call Apple or your Apple dealer to arrange for a replacement. To boot your Mac from a DVD-ROM installation disc, follow these steps: • Insert the Mac OS X Install DVD into the DVD drive. If your Mac uses a tray to hold the DVD, make sure that it retracts and that the disc is in.

• Mount the volume you want to convert into a bootable installer. This could be removable media such as a USB flash drive, or a secondary internal partition.

• Here you will find the disk image that contains the files we need to create a bootable installer. Double-click the InstallESD.dmg file. • This will mount the InstallESD image on your Mac's desktop and open a Finder window that displays the contents of the mounted file. • You may notice that the mounted image seems to contain only a single folder, named Packages. In actuality, there's an entire bootable system on the image file that is hidden.

In summery, my computer has no files and I won't install a new OS. So I'm having a slightly different issue. I've followed your steps, but every time I hit 'erase,' it brings up a notice saying: 'Disk Erase failed with the error: Couldn't unmount disk.' I've attached a pic of the error. However, on the left one can clearly see the main '500.11 GB Toshiba MK5,' and below it, the 'Macintosh HD' option.

THANKS IN ADVANCE. Hi, first of all, thanks for all helps. My situation is, i am stuck somewhere beetween from step 3 to step 4. I have created bootable flash and boot the laptop fom it. I saw the option of boot. I have selected hd 0.2, then came the grey apple logo on white background.

You can use your mouse, trackpad, or keyboard to select the desired drive, and either click on its upward arrow button or press Return once you’ve made your selection. As long as the Mac is compatible with operating system contained on the selected drive, your Mac will continue booting the designated operating system. Examples of when you may need to use the Mac Startup Manager include booting to your Windows Boot Camp partition, booting to a complete cloned backup of your system drive, or reinstalling OS X from a DVD or USB drive. The Mac Startup Manager works great if you have a number of boot options from which to choose, but your Mac also recognizes a few additional startup keys that direct it to boot immediately from a specific source. These keys include holding the C key during boot to boot directly from an inserted CD, DVD, or bootable USB drive, and holding the N key to perform a NetBoot to a compatible network server. Safe Boot If you’ve ever worked in the Windows world, you may be familiar with, which starts the operating system with the bare minimum level of drivers and software to help you isolate the cause of a software issue or conflict. OS X offers a similar mode called. Just as with its Windows counterpart, OS X Safe Boot should be used to help troubleshoot issues that may be caused by corrupt or incompatible software, or to help isolate software issues from hardware failures.

Confirm that you really want to do it and follow the instructions you’ll see on the screen. However, if you are not going to keep your Mac, it would be better to quit the process and let the new owner enter all necessary information. Simply hold down the Command and Q keys and then choose Shut Down to turn the Mac off but leave it waiting for a new user. Now your Mac is clean and ready for a fresh start. We hope this guide was helpful and you got all useful information on how to reset MacBook to factory settings. Stay tuned for updates! These might also interest you: • • •.

Note that your first backup may take a long time, depending on how many files you have. But don’t skip this step — the backup will allow you to restore all your data should somethings goes wrong when you factory reset Mac.

This is accomplished by the application sending your computers serial number to Apple. It even tells you that it is doing this before doing so. Apple's Lion installer on the Lion recovery partition has to phone home in order for it to work. Drawbacks to Lion Recovery Partition I don’t know about you, but that really bugs me a lot and it is a bad idea. Simply because Apple’s new method of recovering a machine could leave me completely without a computer to use unless I had access to the internet. If I were on travel exploring a mountain, a desert, or some other remote location where there are no Apple Stores or public Wi-Fi I’d be completely screwed — so I don’t like this one little bit. On top of that what would a user do if there boot drive failed completely and the recovery partition wasn’t accessible?

Best of all, this will work with Lion,,,,. Step 1: Back Up Your Files! Okay, so you may have a lot of files that you want to get rid of, but you definitely have some files you want to keep. In my case, I even have programs I want to keep so I don't have to re-download them after the process is over. Use a writable CD/DVD, a, or any of the multitude of cloud options to keep your important files backed up.

Once Disk Utility is up and running locate the top most item within the pane with the white colored background and click it. You’ll see something like this if you own a 13-inch Macbook Air: 251 GB APPLE SSD TS256C Media. Now look at the bottom of the Disk Utility window for Partition Map Scheme.

We compared our upload and download speed with the ones of Dropbox and here are the results for 1.12GB file. PCloud Security To guarantee your files’ safety, pCloud uses TLS/SSL encryption, applied when information is transferred from your device to the pCloud servers. Your files are stored on at least three server locations in a highly secure data storage area. Optionally, you can subscribe for and have your most important files encrypted and password protected. We provide the so-called client-side encryption, which, unlike server-side encryption, means that no one except you will have the keys for file decryption.

Getting Rid of Junk: Clean My Mac 3 I’ve been using this brilliant piece of software for a couple of years now and grown extremely fond of it. By MacPaw is a tool for scanning your computer for all sorts of crap and then getting rid of it. Getting rid of junk is not only about the files you create or download.

• Hold the 'x' key during startup. This will force the Mac to boot from OS X or macOS, no matter which disk is specified as the. You may find this useful if you have your Mac set to boot to a non-Mac OS volume, such as Windows or Linux. In some cases, an alternate OS may prevent the Mac's normal boot manager from running. • Hold the 'c' key during startup to boot from a,. If you have, this is an easy way to boot from the installer. • Hold the 'n' key during startup to boot from a networked computer that has a NetBoot volume.

HOW TO: Choose your startup disk on Mac iDB.

In my case VLC Player. The best thing is that since the video is in pCloud Drive it is not actually on my computer but it’s in the cloud and does not take ANY of my Startup Disk Space! Another awesome thing is that I can watch this video also on my phone with the pCloud mobile apps OR if I’m using a different computer that does not have pCloud Drive, I can watch it via Chrome, Firefox or any other internet browser.

• Click the Select Backup Disk button. • Choose the disk you’d like to use as a Time Machine backup, then click Use Disk. • Check the Back Up Automatically box in order to back up your Mac to the chosen disk automatically.

Then from the Restore tab, restore your.dmg to the newly created partition: You can now use your USB key like an installation disc. • For older versions of OS X (10.5, 10.6), you will also have to find an installation medium since there's no way to get them from the App Store, but the rest of the process is the same. If you only have access to a Windows PC: • You will need the OS X install disk image (see above for various methods on how to obtain one), then use the 15-day free trial of to copy the disk image to your USB drive. Be aware that other Windows tools might not be able to read the Apple-native DMG files.

Repair Disk Permissions I try to do this every couple of months. It’s not the end-of-all-problems as some seem to think, but it still pays off to keep your file permissions in check. To only identify issues without making any repairs, run “Verify Disk Permissions”. Erase Free Space This is a little feature in disk utility that many people don’t know of.

Free 64-bit plug-ins for logic pro x. Subatomic Labs has released a new beta version of Mantis307, the 'fat subtractive synthesizer'.This beta uses an all new compiler toolchain which adds: Both 32- and 64-bit VST2.4 now available for Windows and Mac OS X. 64 Bit Plugins (beta). Sakura, Sawer & Toxic Biohazard are available in 64 Bit for testing. Groove Machine is updated. Testing is limited to registered customers only, click here to download and test the plugins. More to follow soon. FL Studio 12.9 Beta 6 is available for testing. FL Studio 12.9 BETA 4. To make sure future releases of their Mac apps are fully 64-bit compatible, developers should the new diagnostic tools in Xcode 9.3 beta and testing on the new macOS 10.13.4 beta. Developers can also use a new 64-bit testing mode in macOS 10.13.4 to test apps for 64-bit compatibility by executing the Terminal command sudo nvram boot-args. Advanced Mac users, administrators, and developers who wish to test Mac OS in 64-bit mode can do so with the help of a terminal command. Essentially this will only allow 64-bit applications and processes to run on the Mac, which can be helpful for discovering what (if any) apps, tasks, components.

The window shown below appears. The window shows the disk space available on your Mac's hard drive. Unfortunately, there's no slick interface like the one in 10.7 or later, but at least you'll know whether or not you're running out of space on your hard drive. Related Articles • • Meet Your Macinstructor, the author of, has been a Mac user for over 20 years. A former ghost writer for some of Apple's most notable instructors, Cone founded Macinstruct in 1999, a site with OS X tutorials that boasts hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month.

If you still have problems, remove the RAM chips temporarily and see whether the problem still exists. Follow the installation instructions that came with the RAM chips — or the ones in the booklet that came with your Mac. But even if they don’t say to get rid of the static spark, you should (by using an antistatic strap available from most RAM sellers or by touching an appropriate surface, such as the power-supply case inside your Mac) before you handle RAM chips.

• Click on the Sign Out button. As simple as that! Erase Touch Bar Data To ensure that all information is cleared from the Touch Bar, you need to erase its data. Follow these steps: • Hold down the Command+R keys after pressing the power button to turn on your Mac or right after your Mac begins to restart. • Choose Utilities > Terminal from the macOS Utilities window. • Type this command in Terminal: xartutil --erase-all • Press Return, type yes when asked if you are sure, and press Return again. • Choose Terminal > Quit Terminal.

Deleting the wrong file can compromise the performance of Photos, which is why we highly suggest you use to clear the cache. It only removes files that are safe to delete, never a critical file or important image. You can for free and see how it works, it’s so much safer than cleaning up cache manually.