If that terrible day comes when your Mac book hangs up and refuses to accept your orders, then a simple iMac boot disk can lend you its hand and get you started with all your data and applications in around a few moments. By creating a mirror image of your hard drive in an external drive, say Fire Wire for example, you will be able to boot the disk from any other Macintosh system and accordingly control the entire system at fingertips. Therefore, here is no tedious software to be installed, no System Preferences settings or desktop wallpaper hunting. Using the regular version of the FireWire drive along with the free version of the Super Duper, making an iMac boot disk is easy and quick.

First you need to make partitions for the external drive for which an entire disk is required for creating a bootable clone. It is only suggested if your Mac's hard drive is smaller than the external FireWire drive. However, you need to set aside some amount of space for creating the mirror image. Now launch the Disk Utility in your Mac and select the external drive followed by going to the Partition tab. Click on the ?Split? button to make two partitions and name them accordingly. Use the slider, located amidst the disk map to adjust the sizes of these two partitions. To do this you will also need to enter the admin password. One point to be noted here is that the destination partition of the bootable disk should be of the same size as that of the Mac's internal hard disk drive.

After partitioning the external drive, you'll again need to check that no important information are on it. After confirming, click on the Partition button. Note one thing that repartitioning the external drive will erase all the information.

SuperDuper, the Mac backup tool will erase the entire information on the external drive through its ?Standard Copy Script? and copy the entire drive of the Mac on it, making it bootable. In the drop down you need to select the external drive and in Copy Dropdown, Mac's internal Drive. SuperDuper will automatically erase all the information on the external disk and will ask for your confirmation. Select the ?Backup- all files? script. Now click on the ?Copy? button to get all rolling.

Now relax for the next one-hour as the SuperDuper will take time to complete its assigned tasks. Time varies accordingly with the size of the disk, the part used and the speed of the Mac. Make sure not to disturb the Mac until the cloning process gets completed. And when the cloning process gets completed, connect the bootable clone to any other powered down Mac system. Pressing the Option button, turn on the power. The Mac's OS X will ask from where it should start booting, listing the clone. Click on the clone twice to start booting from the Clone. Switching to Target Disk Mode from System Preferences ? Start Up Disk, turn on your Mac from the external disk.