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What I don't have:

  • An USB dvd drive

What I have:

  • Another working, up to date, Macbook (with snow leopard).

  • purchased Mountain Lion on the app store

  • A desktop PC

  • A 4GB usb stick.

  • A USB harddrive I'd like not to wipe out entirely.

My macbook pro's dvd drive seems busted, I spray some dry air inside and tried to 90 degrees trick, did not work.

Doesn't apple provide some way to make a bootable usb thing ?

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Have you tried cleaning the dvd drive with one of [these] lens cleaners CD's? They only cost a few dollar and it worked for me when I my superdrive didn't read any discs anymore. – Bart Arondson Jan 22 at 19:21

1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote

There is a few way you can do this from the working MacBook. The first is to follow the tutorial here which will take you through the process of making a bootable USB disk for Mountain Lion.

The steps involve

  • Reformat the USB stick to HFS+
  • Extract the install image from the downloaded installer
  • Write the image to the USB using Disk Utility

Alternatively just download the Lion DiskMaker software which will do all the work for you.

The only problem I can forsee is that you need an 8GB USB stick for this to work since the OSX installation is bigger then 4GB.

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I wonder if I can resize my usb hdd partition, to not lose what's on it... ? – jokoon Jan 22 at 19:59
@jokoon Both method require the Drive to be reformatted a raw write to be done using dd. There is a very good change you will lose data. – Diago Jan 22 at 20:49

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