The Recovery partition in Mac OS X is an important component of a system install in that it allows you to troubleshoot a computer, repair drives, restore from backups, and even reinstall Mac OS if need be. Nonetheless, in some specific situations you may find that a Mac does not have a Recovery partition, usually … Read More
Though we’d all rather everything works as intended with our Macs, occasionally something goes really haywire and OS X becomes either royally messed up or unusable. In these circumstances, sometimes the only solution to get things working again is to reinstall OS X system software (or, if you have a recent safe backup made, restoring … Read More
Need to restore a Mac from a Time Machine backup? This article will show you how to do that. While Macs have a great reputation for being stable and rarely experiencing major issues, the reality is that sometimes things can go wrong. Typically this happens when either a hard drive fails or a Mac OS … Read More
In some rare situations, reinstalling OS X on a Mac may be required. This is made fairly easy as all modern Macs include the OS X Internet Recovery feature, which lets you reinstall OS X through a netboot type of mode that is accessed from the internet rather than a local drive. This is helpful … Read More
The newest Macs ship with a Recovery partition rather than a separate external reinstall disk, and if you’ve ever rebooted a newer Mac, iMac, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with an SSD from the Recovery partition to reformat the drive, you may have noticed that by default the “Security Options” button is greyed out in … Read More
If you have tried to repair the boot volume before in Mac OS X before, you’ll undoubtedly have found the “Repair Disk” option is grey and unavailable within the Disk Utility tool. While this is still the case while booted in most versions of Mac OS X, you can repair the Mac OS X boot … Read More
All Macs with OS X Mavericks, Yosemite, Lion, Mountain Lion, have a bootable Recovery partition that can be accessed in case of system problems, allowing you to troubleshoot, restore from Time Machine backups, and even reinstall Mac OS X. There are two ways to reach Recovery mode on a Mac: Hold down the OPTION key … Read More
One of several changes to newer versions of OS X is how resetting passwords is handled, previous versions of Mac OS X would have a password reset tool easily accessible from the Utilities menu but that isn’t available anymore, and for some added security you now must access a password reset tool through the command … Read More
Whether you’re just trying to update iOS firmware, downgrade, or jailbreak, it’s not terribly unusual for an iPhone to get stuck in Recovery Mode. You’ll know you’re stuck because the phone displays the classic USB to iTunes logo, and iTunes gives you the Recovery Mode detected message. Sometimes you can escape just by hardbooting the … Read More
RecBoot is a great tool for Mac OS X that allows you to easily enter and exit iPhone recovery mode without manually holding down any of the buttons. Using the app is extraordinarily simple, you just connect your iOS device to your Mac, launch RecBoot, and click on either “Exit Recovery” or “Enter Recovery” to … Read More
Sometimes things go wrong and you need to put your iPhone into Recovery Mode to restore it and get it working again. It turns out that Recovery Mode is what your iPhone goes into when you are doing a standard iOS upgrade or restore anyway, but you may want to put your iPhone into recovery … Read More
