Boot Mac with Internet Recovery HD

Can you imagine that you can boot your Mac even after your drive is damaged or crashed and your Recovery HD is not working properly? It is possible with the new feature of Mac release in mid 2011 or later known as­ Internet Recovery.

It is much like your standard recovery partition in your Mac, and you can boot your Mac even if your Mac is not connected using this OS X internet Recovery.How Internet Recovery Works?

A code is stored into your Mac's firmware, these codes are used by Internet Recovery in the form of some combination. However in standard recovery mode, it uses the software in partition of your Mac drive.

An appropriate boot image is stored on Apple's servers which are used by our Mac to boot Mac into Internet Recovery mode.

So, these are the two things which are used by internet recovery mode in order to boot your Mac without Recovery HD .

Specifically, when you go for Internet Recovery, in order to get that boot image, your Mac contacts Apple's Internet Recovery servers and requests it that appropriate bootable disk image.

Your Mac then automatically downloads the necessary code over the Internet and boots.

Note: It's not always necessary that during installing Mac, recovery HD partition creates in every Mac. So, in this case you must know how to create bootable disk Mac  and clone of Recovery HD using some great utility like Stellar Drive Clone application. And that can be achieved through Stellar Drive clone. It have many advanced features also in its new release of 2.5 version.

Process after booting into Recovery HD:

Requirements for Booting with Internet Recovery, is obvious to have internet connection or your Mac connected with ethernet network. If not connected with ethernet, then other option is to connect with a Wi-Fi network.

It tests all minimal requirements like your Mac's RAM and hard drive.

However, while Internet Recovery is an immensely useful feature, and it could even be a lifeguard or life-saver in emergency situations like hard drive damaged etc. It has one major drawback:

It's very, very slow compared to standard recovery mode, because it is obvious as it must first download the necessary software. In fact, when you boot into Internet Recovery, the first screen you will see a slow-moving progress bar with a warning that booting will take a while.

Way of Booting from Internet Recovery:

If you want to see how it boot from internet recovery, then you can do by holding down Command Option R at startup. But if it doesn't come into play, then you must understand the fact that it doesn't happen until and unless you really need means when your standard recovery HD is gone.

Actually the fact is that you can even succeed to boot, your Mac will boot from internet recovery in a case when your Standard recovery HD partition is damaged or erased. So, if you normally wants your Mac to boot from internet recovery, it instead boot into standard recovery mode only. As I tried many times, but fails to boot into internet recovery. I had actually tried this many times in order to test it, but somehow I manage to do it, and able to access the Recovery HD partition and then erase it from drive. Only then or with the blank drive with no recovery HD partition, I was able to do so.

Partition Mac drive and manage data without any failure

Partitioning Mac drive is a necessary process in all systems having any OS. For Mac users it plays a very important role in maintaining performance of their Mac drive. First, it is required to know why partitioning is beneficial:

Using partitions you can place your different kinds of related files in different partitions. For example, it is good to keep user files separate from OS files. Partitioning protects other volumes from corruption if one volume gets any corruption.

• By creating Partitions one can protect his data from unauthorized access, by hiding it.
• Repartition your boot drive without any data loss by using adroit tool like Stellar Partition Manager.
• Partitioning enables you to have multi-boot system, one system having so many OS, like Windows, Mac etc.
• You can reclaim free space using this software.

It improve performance as we can keep frequently used files together in one partition, by doing this, the OS need not keep searching in whole drive. So, it increases Mac performance indirectly.

For details visit:http://www.stellarpartitionmanager.com/

Tips to Reclaim Hard Disk Space in Mac OS X

To maintain performance of your system you need to free up some space in your drive. So, it is necessary to keep checking your hard drive status. When your Mac drive gets closer to its capacity, it affects Mac performance considerably. In this situation, in addition to your actual RAM, OS X also uses your Mac disk as Virtual memory. The insufficient RAM is the main cause for an extremely lethargic Mac. But, before increasing RAM you could try few of space saving tips mentioned below.

Clear unnecessary files from Mac disk:

Clean unnecessary cache files, log files, language files, duplicate files, universal binaries etc. for reclaiming space occupied by all clutters. Remove unnecessary language files resources by downloading Stellar Speed Up Mac. This would recover up to half gigabyte of disk space on hard disk and speedup your Mac performance.

Re-index by Spotlight:

Spotlight is the feature that automatically indexes all the files, contents of your Mac drive in early hours of each morning. But, if you turn your Mac off at night, Spotlight can’t have had a chance to re-index.

So, prevent causing unresponsiveness and performance issues, one should use Spotlight to force it to re-index. By clicking- open System Preferences, then click “Spotlight” and after that choose “Privacy” tab.

For re-index any volume, Click the “+” icon and choose your desired volume you want to re-index. After few minutes remove that volume by “-” icon. By this way, Spotlight will re-index the volume.

Memory even less than system requirement:

According to system requirement of Apple’s Mountain lion, 8 GB of disk space is needed for its installation. However, if your Mac is running out of space then you might figure out a significant degradation in its performance. It will become worse if you’ve low memory too, as your system may not have enough disk space to use it as virtual memory, thus problem arises.

So, you must have the required amount of free space available in drive. And you should think over that, do you really have enough disk space for storing applications, movies, photos, OS X and more..?

The more apps you’ve installed the more disk space is consumed. The more files your Mac has the longer it take to find files, index them (for Spotlight).

So, the lesson here is to make sure that you have possibly archived your old files to an external disk, compress them or simply delete the stuff you don’t need anymore or rarely used, uninstall files before deleting them etc.

Quick and Easy Tricks to revitalizing your Mac

Are you struggling with slow Mac performance? Now, need not to worry because I have got a couple of easy and quick tricks for your slow Mac. So, when I got stuck due to this slow Mac behaviour after any updation, the first thing I prefer to do is checking my system configuration.

So, it is advisable to check hardware configuration of your Mac whenever you feel undesirable performance. As we know with every upcoming version of Mac OS X, Apple usually increases system requirements for many good reasons. As these applications perform complicated tasks, there lies a valid reason behind increase in hunger for memory consumption. This consumption of more space in memory may affect Mac speed and performance.

So, determining the need of memory or RAM is must, before increasing RAM or performing any other step.

Clearing Clutters from your Mac:

It is one of the common reasons of slowing down Mac speed. Clearing these unwanted files such as duplicate files, log files, universal binaries, etc. using some software may help to regain its previous speed. With the passage of time, there accumulates plenty of files in our machine (out of which some are useless) and consume a lot of space in our drive. You can clean such types of files and your entire drive using Stellar Speedup Mac tool.

If slow behaviour is not because of any above reasons then there could be any troublesome file located in drive causing the issue. So, this kind of issue can be resolved by resetting your PRAM. Now, you need to know some simple steps to reset your PRAM to avoid such issues.

Resetting Your PRAM:

Resetting PRAM is important and easy step that let enhance your Mac performance. It also clears out all potential issues of your Mac. PRAM resetting clears out all caches on your drive that are responsible for sluggish Mac.

To reset you’re PRAM: During the boot process, hold down [Option] + [Command] + [P] + [R] together, immediately just after Mac has shutdown.After this, your Mac will reboot again. After which you can release those keys and now you have successfully reset your PRAM.

Monitoring Activity Monitor:

When you are at the height of multitasking (performing many tasks at a time),you might feel the need of taking a nap in every noon. In Mac, there is an easy way to see which open applications using most CPU and memory resources.

Just open the Activity Monitor. You will see the numbers are constantly fluctuating, showing you the amount of system resources used by each application. For example: This morning when I am watching the Activity Monitor, I found that Firefox generally takes more CPU resources and about triple the memory resources compared to chrome. So, perhaps now it's time to abandon Firefox use for me and replace it with Google Chrome exclusively.

Safe Boot improve performance by clearing out cache:

Starting your Mac in safe boot will clear all the cache stored on your drive. Safe boot process can take a bit more time than resetting PRAM. But, it is another good way to purge some files that cause performance issues.

For a safe boot: Reboot your system and hold down [Shift] key, during boot process, until you see the login screen. When you reach the login screen, you will succeed to see the words Safe Boot within the login pane. Log in and reboot to complete the process.

Disk utility is not enough for imaging Mac drive

Imaging is a technique of taking backup by taking image of given file or drive. Backup of Mac drive is first thing which one should keep in mind while doing any activity related to transfer files,deleting,upgradation etc.

In order to protect our data from losing through any reason, one should always keep Regular backups. Imaging of some file or folder is a way to keep backup in the form of its image. You can take backup either by using Mac inbuilt utility named as disk utility or third party software. Disk utility helps to take exact image of your present state of hard drive.

But, you can't make clone of your drive by using Disk utility.

Here, I am describing step by step process to create image of Mac drive with this utility.

1. Go to Applications -> Utilities then double-click on Disk Utility.

2. First close other applications, then select your Mac's internal drive from the left-hand pane of your Disk Utility.

3. Click on File in the toolbar, after that select 'New' then Disk Image from hard drive.

4. Give some name to your Mac backup and then designate your external drive as the destination from drop-down menu.

5. You can change image settings and can make it read only, compressed, read/write or encrypted also.
Generally we make default setting as "compressed" image format with no encryption. But, if your data is confidential(whether personal or official) its recommended to use encryption.

6. Click on 'Save' to start the process of creating disk image on your selected external hard drive (as destination drive). This process will take few minutes. Then it will notify you by giving some message when the process is finished.

You can save your disk image as backup in form of 'Image'. Apart from this by Disk utility you can authenticate your disk images by applying password-protect and encryption against unauthorized access.

So, using Disk utility you can only do imaging. That's why we generally opt for some third party tool which perform cloning as well. I have been using Stellar Drive clone effectively and found it nice to my Mac drive.

By using this software you can clone your Recovery HDD (in case of Mac Lion) automatically Block level cloning (it involves cloning of entire block at a time)is faster than file level cloning(It involves one by one cloning of files.) Bothtypes of cloning File -level and Block -level are performed by this software.

Defrag drive to boost up Mac performance

Organizing fragmented files together in contiguous manner on hard disk is called defragmentation. As we know files are automatically get fragmented in due course of time after too many modifications. It results in increase in fetching time of processor. So, when user calls a program, OS have to search for its related files. It may delay the process if these files are scattered in memory blocks. So, defragmentation is suggested for faster read/write operations which reduces processing time.

Why Defragmentation is necessary?

Generally, if you ask any Mac user then he will tell you that there is no need to defragment your Mac drive. But only in case of those users who don't work on large files. Because HFS+ of Mac OS X is capable enough to avoid fragmentation in your Mac, up to some small extent (small files of 20MB size) only. But, as we know, our drive have large files such as videos, photos etc. So, defragmentation is necessary to perform for those having bulky files.

Although this topic is controversial but from my own experience I would vote in favour of  defragmentation for improving Mac performance. Yes, it is not clear that how many times one should perform defragmentation, but it depends upon the efficiency of utility and amount of files your Mac possess.

Note: For enabling this utility to work on your drive, it require to have more 10% of free space in your Mac drive.

Software to defragment drive for speeding up Mac:

So, now it is time to get rid of your sluggish Mac and to select a tool that will defrag your drive easily, smoothly, rapidly and that too without any disturbance. The word disturbance is used in a context of a technique known as Hot File Clustering. In which Mac OS X, frequently access files in a Hot zone in-order to perform defragmenting . I know much professional and competent software which do its job without interfering in Mac OS X process.

Stellar Drive Defrag is the most trusted product when we talk about defragmention of Mac drives. The tool is recommended by Mac experts too.

It is advisable to take backup of your system initially as it will protect your data from any mishap. Using this software one can also determine the temperature of the drive and can monitor hard drive status. All the features are available in a demo version of the software. Which is available for free download on the respective website.

This software provides reliability, security and enhance Mac performance just in few clicks. There are several applications available in market but most I heard about is Stellar Drive Defrag. You can defrag your entire drive or single drive its all up to your requirement. And this software enables you to defragment meta-data files and optimizes free space.

Tips to overcome fragmentation and slow Mac issues

We know that slow Mac is caused by many reasons and among all of them, fragmentation of Mac files is one. So, in this article we deal with the effects of fragmentation on our system and tips to resolve all such issues.

Is your application taking more time to open which usually had taken seconds. Sometimes its really irritating when you have a lot of work and your mouse acting weired or very slow? So, beware of these activities. Because all these are signs of sluggish Mac and you need to take an appropriate action before it goes unbearable.

Such cases eventually leads to data loss and requires Mac File Recovery to be handled, if the backup is not in place.


Effects of fragmentation on your Mac:

• It starts freezing during general file operations and taking long time to respond. Sometimes in such situations, during system operations system may crash and so the data structure of your system get damaged. And requires Mac file recovery, if backup is not taken place.
  
• Sometimes due to heavy fragmentation there are chances of partition table and file system corruption. In such conditions, you face critical data loss situations.
  
• BootCamp partition creation requires free contiguous space on hard drive which is not available due to fragmented data. 
   
  

Free tips to remove the problem of fragmentation as shown below:

Updation and re installation of softwares:
The software and drivers present in your Mac hard drive should be updated to the latest one, to improve the performance of your syatem. Windows and Mac's have features of giving automatic alerts to let you know when your machine needs an update. So, you just require to update manually.

Defragging Mac hard drive:

As HFS+only avoid fragmentation upto 20mb. So, you need to go for some third party tool like Stellar drive defrag, idefrag etc. Mac has HFS+ file system which only capable to avoid condition of fragmentation in small files of 20mb only. Defragmentation performs free space optimization and enables to utilize maximum free space available in drive.

 

Increasing RAM is another great solution:

Increase RAM is one of great solution to enhance speed of system. As it quite expensive so before installing more RAM one must check whether it required or not. So, you need to know how to determine need of RAM in system. 

 

Third party Application for defragmenting Mac:

You can optimize your Mac performance by defragging Mac files using third party application. The one I know is Stellar drive defrag which is capable enough to perform free space optimization. It enables you to make maximum utilization of free space available in drive.This software also gives you status of your hard drive.

Improve Mac performance by Cleaning Up Mac drive

Apple's Mac mountain lion is undoubtedly an amazing operating system. It is designed with many advanced features and benefits over its predecessor. However, users are still facing slow Mac which result into degradation of performance.

Although in Mac the most important thing is -­-­- data accessing speed. Apple designed Mac OS X with such proficiency and excellence that these are used for both home and business purposes.

Often Mac users (including me) work on large multimedia files or graphics. So, after a long usage Mac starts behaving sluggish. My friend who bought a new Mac, few days ago came to me to share issue he was facing with his Mac. He was surprised as his Mac was just few months old and gone so slow. I can understand that it frustrate you because waiting for application to load is irritating.

Well, I told him the cause of slow Mac and how to solve this problem. So, This is caused by the accumulation of unwanted files and applications as the time moves. Now, one by one I will describe how these files created and affect system performance.

One thing which you may not realize is that the more apps you have in start up list that automatically runs on system boot, this lead your Mac take more time to boot. So, minimize the startup items list inorder to reduce the load upon startup.

 

The most important step one could take to speed up their Mac is cleaning up unwanted applications. It includes timely deleting computers cache files, removing identical (duplicate) files, removing unused applications, language files, unnecessary log files and universal binaries. 
 

All these files contribute to deceleration in efficiency of Mac. Due to this, these files are considered as junk. So, by taking away these files from your Mac is the only way to bring your Mac back in prime condition.

After clean up Mac OS, you can additionally improve its swiftness by defragmenting your drives. Defragmentation helps you to reclaim some valuable are in your exhausting drive, that otherwise occupied by clutters. Mac hard disk will become fragmented with time, means pieces of files are scattered in different destinations, thus processor have to search for related files and it effects Mac efficiencey. By disk defragmenter all files transfer to appropriate places in contigous manner in hard drive.

Creating more free space on hard drive is a good way to boost up your Mac operationes. By deleting the programs which you don't use very often, you can free up space in drive.

So, the above mentioned steps explain what to do for cleaning Mac drive. To know how you can perform these steps for clearing clutters from it visit following link:

http://www.stellarspeedupmac.com/

How to Defrag Mac OS X to increase performance

I often see Mac guys getting irritated with their slow Mac performance. Although Mac becomes sluggish after a long usage but the problem can also occur in new machines. However, there are many reasons that may cause your Mac run slow but the most prominent is Fragmentation. 

So, in order to overcome this issue, you need to know all about fragmentation process and also the way of defragging your Mac drive. Regardless of operating system you have, slow computer/machine is an issue with everyone.

How fragmentation occurs and what are its ill effects:

The files you store in Mac drives, are fragmented (files scattered into many pieces or parts) and stored at different locations in memory devices. Due to this, the OS takes more time for searching and fetching the related fragments of files which you attempt to open.

I found people asking questions about defragmenting Mac drive and whether it helps to speed up Mac performance or not. This question is very common among Mac users and has been answered by many experts at many famous forums.

In Mac, there is an advanced feature to avoid the chances of fragmentation of files upto certain level. This automatic defragmentation is applicable over a specific size limit of 20MB only. It raises the question among Mac users about the need of defragmentation in Mac.

What actually the built-in defragmentation safeguards do?

Now, there is need to know what this built-in system does for reducing fragmentation of files. The HFS+ file system of Mac OS X keeps large number of small files together and leaves large free space on drive which might be allocated to larger files later. Hence, reducing the need for defragmentation of files in Mac.
 

At the time of writing files in drive, the OS doesn't use space freed most recently but, rather it seeks for a large space to write the entire file in one place. While Mac OS X have great built-in safeguards to keep your drive optimized , it doesn't go as far as any third party utility would.

Note: It is required to note that all these automatic features of Mac OS X and file system work only when you have more than 10% free space available on your drive.

Defragmenting Mac OS X using specialized tool:

Specialised tools will definitely perform better job by grouping frequently used files together on the fastest part of drive. Defragmenting files of Mac drive irrespective of size resulting in highly optimized drive. 

As per my experience Stellar Drive Defrag software is an optimal solution for defragmenting Mac volumes. I have find numerous feedback and heard positive experience of users in several reviews and comments. So one could try its free download version to check the fragmented files in his drive.

Free download link: http://www.stellardefragdrive.com/free-download-drive-defrag.php

Complete package for Mac Maintenance and optimization

Today the world is digital, computers are becoming our basic need. But, in this era of modern technology we shouldn't forget that these digital devices are after all machines, and as such, they have certain life period.

So, we could not avoid maintenance of our computer or machine. A regular maintenance will increase the life of your machine but when the proper maintenance is not carried out, the life expectancy shortens considerably. Here I will talk about Mac hard drive and its maintenance. 
 
Keep Maintenance of your Mac drive:
There are lists of Mac maintenance tasks you can do to maintain its performance and keep it running smoothly as the day one. So, here are few tasks to be performed for drive maintenance and optimization:

• Drive defragmentation - When files are updated, they often grow their original storage space. Actually the computer will fragment the files into parts and instead of moving the entire file to a new location, it places these fragments in noncontiguous manner. In Mac, it is done by Mac Journaled file system i.e HFS+. So, when the file is called up, processor searches the files and related pieces scattered in drive. This adds unnecessary wear on the drives read/write heads. Def-ragging arranges all those fragments in order to optimize operations.

• Getting rid of unused files: - Unused files can either be deleted or relocated in some other external drive. Large media files, such as video, movies or pictures, takes lot of space. So, if they are not necessary, user can delete them. Otherwise you can have another option of relocating the files in archived or on external media. This will opens an option of allowing you access to these files if you need, as well as it keeps them from consuming space on drive. 
 
• Handling with care - If you don't want to go data lab for emergency data recovery, users must handle their machines with care. Laptops are particularly susceptible to any abuse. Dropping these machines damages the internal delicate components of drive. However, solid-state drives(SSD) are sturdy, but heat, electrical intensification and other abuses can damage these as well.

Prepare for your Mac drive crash:
The first and most important thing a computer user should perform is to prepare for his drive crash or corruption. It is must to have some arrangements in-order to protect your precious data. So, make an effective backup plan is crucial for data protection. Additionally, you can make boo-table clone of Mac drive or recovery HD also, using some third-party utility.

Removing Junk File Types:
Improve Mac performance by Clearing up all clutters from Mac drive like cache, duplicate files, unused applications, undesirable log information and language support files and universal binaries. All these files are said to be junk files or clutters, removing them is a necessity for optimizing Mac performance.

Now, the good news is that you don't need to buy many sepatare software for cloning, defragmentation, clean up Mac, disk wipe, data encryption, volume repair etc, because there is an all-in-one complete utility for optimizing your Mac drive. This utility is Stellar Drive Tool box having a bundle of 12 utilities. This is a complete package for optimizing entire Mac performance.

Activities which affect Mac speed and performance

How to know about the reasons which make my Mac slow? Many users like me, ask this question when they experience sluggish Mac. Me too did this and googled for reasons of slow Mac. I found that the unnecessary data and applications(installed accidentally) ,are the major causes of the issue.

The user don't even realize that while he was accessing Internet, his system has automatically updated as per the required status. Such updates fulfills the flaw of the system which boost up the performance. But some times it has negative impact as the memory space gets filled with unwanted files. The memory congestion is one of the factor which slows down the Mac performance.

The concept of multi tasking is a kind of revolution in the computer technology. But, sometimes we open many applications simultaneously and use only few of them. But, unlike the user, system always remember unused applications. Hence it is quite clear that idle applications too engages both memory and processor and decrease Mac performance. The tools like Speech Recognition, Blue-tooth etc., are rarely used but, always remain running in background. It is advisable to disable them soon after the usage.

Outdated or expired applications can also affect the functionality of Mac. License bounded software only allow few features to be accessed by user. But, occupy full space as per the compatibility requirements.

The most crucial factor that affect the performance of Mac is the hard disk space. Many times we keep our hard drive congested with unused, unwanted and duplicate data. Which will defiantly degrade the performance of the system.

Taking backup in external drive is one option to free the hard drive space. But if you want to bypass all the manual activity then try some third party Mac cleaning tool.

For users who are not aware of these techniques, to optimize Mac performance. These users must try some tool for cleaning their Mac drive as manual practices can't help you completely. 
Stellar speedup Mac and Drive Tool box are some really great tools to maintain your Mac health and keep it remain fit.