So if Mountain Lion is installed, the main partition, called the startup disk, has the Mountain Lion OS on it, & the hidden Recovery partition has the 'mini' OS & the apps it can run on it.) (A partition is a subdivision of a hard drive that acts like a separate disk. If Lion or Mountain Lion was installed on it, it should also have a tiny little Recovery partition, which contains a 'mini' version of the OS that can only run the few applications included on that partition. The internal drive usually has Mac OS X on it. It must come from somewhere, like the hard disk drive inside a Mac, or an external USB drive. A computer can't do anything without an operating system except find, load, & run one. In case it isn't clear to you, the 'OS' is the operating system of the computer. If you mean the internal disk in your MBA, you could not have started up from it after it was erased (except possibly in Recovery mode.) So the chances of there being any data on there is slim anyway. I think I did start back up my computer from the same disk, I will have to check. If, after reading all the Prosoft instructions, you still have questions, you can contact the company's product support - after all, you are paying for the product so you might as well get your money's worth.

I suggest getting an external drive twice or larger than the capacity of your built-in drive so you can use it later for Time Machine backups. You will need to purchase Data Recovery 3, a suitable external drive for the recovered files, & something like a USB stick to install the OS on, like Tony T1 suggested. That means you can't start up from it (because you erased the OS that runs the machine), or reinstall the OS from the Recovery partition, or in any way involve that drive besides reading data from it with a utility like Data Rescue 3.

That means you cannot install the OS & Safari on it. That's why it is so very important to regularly make backups!Īlso, just to be sure you understand, you cannot write anything to the drive until you have attempted to recover data from it. If you have not been making backups there is no other place it is stored besides on the drive you erased. The only place that keeps backups is iCloud, Time Machine, etc. So when I restart computer I go directly to Safari and Data Rescue 3 and download? Oh no! There's no other disc or place that keeps files and stuff?

How do i create a startup disk for mac