One of the scary aspects of purchasing, downloading, and installing the latest version of OS X Mountain Lion for my Mac was the lack of a DVD. Apple’s Mac App Store, and OS X installers, work well enough to make upgrading to the latest and greatest OS X simple, safe, and not too problematic.
What if you want to build a bootable DVD or USB flash drive with OS X Mountain Lion? Apple doesn’t make that an easy process. It’s obvious they don’t want Mac users to have that kind of freedom (at least, easily implemented).
Lion DiskMaker is a free Mac app that it can create an installer disk by burning OS X Mountain Lion onto a DVD or a bootable USB flash drive (oddly named, because it works on both Mac OS X Lion, and OS X Mountain Lion).
All you need is to have downloaded OS X Mountain Lion (and have it stored on your Mac), a SuperDrive, writable DVD of the proper type, or a USB flash drive of at least 8 gigabytes.
After that, double-click Lion DiskMaker and walk through the five or six steps to create a bootable DVD or USB flash drive. LionDiskMaker will find the downloaded installer app for Lion or Mountain Lion.
First, it will ask how you want to create the bootable installer; choose DVD (and device), or USB flash device).
Then get lunch. It takes that long and there’s no notification display so you’ll know how much time is remaining on the installation.
I’ve tried Lion DiskMaker twice on my Mac. Once with a DVD, and once with an eight gigabyte USB flash drive. The DVD seems to boot up slower than what I remember of Apple DVD installers (I haven’t used one for a few years), but the USB flash drive is faster.
When you’re done you’ll have OS X Mountain Lion (and it works on Mac OS X Lion’s installer) on a DVD or USB flash drive, ready to boot and install on any qualified device. This can be handy if you have a Mac that needs an upgrade but has a slow internet connection.
Lion DiskMaker is nicely done, simple, seems to work flawlessly, and is free (actually, it’s donation ware).