Emergency boot drive - software?

[Paulywauly]

Hi, I'm thinking of creating a small, emergency boot drive on an sd card and would like your thoughts on what kind of software would be useful to put on it?
So far the only things that come to mind are the Mac disc utility and carbon copy cloner.
Any thoughts welcome!

 

[MacForScience]

Hi, I'm thinking of creating a small, emergency boot drive on an sd card and would like your thoughts on what kind of software would be useful to put on it?
So far the only things that come to mind are the Mac disc utility and carbon copy cloner.
Any thoughts welcome!

I don't know if this helps but what I do is when I get my computer setup the way I want (with none of my files on it) I clone the hard disk to an external drive that way I can always get back to square one as it were (This should be done before you use the computer a lot and risk data corruption or other issues). Also if you set the drive up correctly you can make it bootable using partitions etc.

When I think computer emergency boot disk I am thinking get back to square one ie up and running as soon as possible so having a clean copy of your OS with all the apps installed and setup is nice then all you have to do is restore your data using something like time machine.

As far as more directly relating to your question I don't know how comfortable you are with the Terminal but something like this may be useful: http://www.titanium.free.fr/index.php (Onyx).

 

[Paulywauly]

Thanks for the link will check these out

i actually already have a bootable clone drive set up which clones every day, also have time machine running too.

The main reason i was after an emergency boot drive was more to be able to carry it to boot both my own machines and other macs (family, friends, work etc) using it in case of some sort of system failure to help me diagnose faults easier and fix them if necessary. Almost like a portable toolkit really