Interesting query about storage

Hey, I recently acquired my Mountain Lion Installer for use on a bootable drive

The size of the bootable drive is 4.43GB, but the installer is only 21.7MB?

I'v attached an image here, to further show my point:

imgur: the simple image sharer

HOWEVER, on my Mavericks bootable drive, the installer is much larger in size, relative to the size of the bootable drive total size, see here:

imgur: the simple image sharer

Is this normal? I'm a bit confused haha.

Thanks.

That is normal. Mavericks uses a different structure on the USB stick.

ClarkeFace said:

The size of the bootable drive is 4.43GB, but the installer is only 21.7MB?

Is this normal? I'm a bit confused haha.

Click to expand...

Somethings not right. I still have my original Mountain Lion installer on my computer (I haven't made a bootable USB stick from it yet). And when I do a "get info" on it...it reports that it is 4.37 gigabytes.

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

Somethings not right. I still have my original Mountain Lion installer on my computer (I haven't made a bootable USB stick from it yet). And when I do a "get info" on it...it reports that it is 4.37 gigabytes.

- Nick

Click to expand...

okay, would you recommend i just copy the .dmg file onto my usb ?

I'm currently using a programme called DiskMaker X, which a lot of people seem to recommend.

The Installer is not that big, merely a program to run the actual installation. And the 4.3GB program wille xpand to around 8-10GB without any applications. Using LionDiscMaker is the shot.

Hey Guys, just an update here.

I rang up Apple and they explained a process called the "OS X Internet Recovery Mode" which I didn't know existed.

This is done by holding CMD + ALT + R on startup.

Basically it allows you to install the OS that your mac shipped with - without a bootable usb

OS X Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks only.

Hopefully i wont even need to do this - I might not have any problems with Mavericks on my system, WHO KNOWS! haha.

That method (Internet Recovery) works great if your hard drive hasn't crashed. I suspect it's not going to work from a newly installed bare drive since you'll have no way to access the internet without at least a Recovery partition.

The best and surest method of recovery is to have a bootable clone of your hard drive on an external drive that you can boot from.

And Internet Recovery requires you to download 5 gb of data, which may be inconvenient if you don't have swift connections. What chscag said, plus the download demand, is my reason for having a bootable installer on a usb stick.