These advanced steps are primarily for system administrators and others who are familiar with the command line. You don't need a bootable installer to upgrade macOS or reinstall macOS, but it can be useful when you want to install on multiple computers without downloading the installer each time.
Make Windows Bootable USB Mac with PassFab 4WinKey. Thinking about how do I create a.
- Sep 27, 2017 The simplest way to create a boot USB drive is to download DiskMaker X and use it to create your drive. Generally, the latest version supports only the latest version of macOS; if you want to install something older than macOS High Sierra, check the list of older versions and download one that's compatible with your chosen operating system.
- If you want to use your USB stick with an Apple Mac, you will need to restart or power-on the Mac with the USB stick inserted while the Option/alt (⌥) key is pressed. This will launch Apple's ‘Startup Manager' which shows bootable devices connected to the machine.
- With a basic installation of OS X on our diagnostic drive, we can boot a Mac that otherwise won't boot. Getting Our Diagnostic Drive Ready. Before we begin, we first need a USB hard drive. For this tutorial, I am using an old 320GB USB drive.
- Jun 14, 2020 Steps 1. Download the Mac OS X Lion Installer from the App Store. The latest versions of the Mac operating system are only. The download can take some time depending on your internet connection. Don't worry if you lose connection halfway. Make a backup of the installer you downloaded from.
Download macOS
Find the appropriate download link in the upgrade instructions for each macOS version:
macOS Catalina, macOS Mojave, ormacOS High Sierra
Installers for each of these macOS versions download directly to your Applications folder as an app named Install macOS Catalina, Install macOS Mojave, or Install macOS High Sierra. If the installer opens after downloading, quit it without continuing installation. Important: To get the correct installer, download from a Mac that is using macOS Sierra 10.12.5 or later, or El Capitan 10.11.6. Enterprise administrators, please download from Apple, not a locally hosted software-update server.
Create Mac Os Usb Boot
OS X El Capitan
El Capitan downloads as a disk image. On a Mac that is compatible with El Capitan, open the disk image and run the installer within, named InstallMacOSX.pkg. It installs an app named Install OS X El Capitan into your Applications folder. You will create the bootable installer from this app, not from the disk image or .pkg installer.
Mac Mini Boot From Usb
Use the 'createinstallmedia' command in Terminal
- Connect the USB flash drive or other volume that you're using for the bootable installer. Make sure that it has at least 12GB of available storage and is formatted as Mac OS Extended.
- Open Terminal, which is in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder.
- Type or paste one of the following commands in Terminal. These assume that the installer is still in your Applications folder, and MyVolume is the name of the USB flash drive or other volume you're using. If it has a different name, replace
MyVolumein these commands with the name of your volume.
Catalina:*
Mojave:*
High Sierra:*
El Capitan: - Press Return after typing the command.
- When prompted, type your administrator password and press Return again. Terminal doesn't show any characters as you type your password.
- When prompted, type
Yto confirm that you want to erase the volume, then press Return. Terminal shows the progress as the bootable installer is created. - When Terminal says that it's done, the volume will have the same name as the installer you downloaded, such as Install macOS Catalina. You can now quit Terminal and eject the volume.
* If your Mac is using macOS Sierra or earlier, include the --applicationpath argument, similar to the way this argument is used in the command for El Capitan.
Use the bootable installer
After creating the bootable installer, follow these steps to use it:
- Plug the bootable installer into a compatible Mac.
- Use Startup Manager or Startup Disk preferences to select the bootable installer as the startup disk, then start up from it. Your Mac will start up to macOS Recovery.
Learn about selecting a startup disk, including what to do if your Mac doesn't start up from it. - Choose your language, if prompted.
- A bootable installer doesn't download macOS from the Internet, but it does require the Internet to get information specific to your Mac model, such as firmware updates. If you need to connect to a Wi-Fi network, use the Wi-Fi menu in the menu bar.
- Select Install macOS (or Install OS X) from the Utilities window, then click Continue and follow the onscreen instructions.
Learn more
For more information about the createinstallmedia command and the arguments that you can use with it, make sure that the macOS installer is in your Applications folder, then enter this path in Terminal: Filterdesignlab iir for mac.
Catalina:
Mojave:
High Sierra:
El Capitan:
Booting from a USB stick is nowadays more and more important. More and more PCs (and servers) are delivered by default without a CD/DVD drive. To install the OS of your choice, USB sticks provide you the easiest possibility. In fact, it can even work out cheaper than burning a CD or DVD that you just throw away once the version is outdated.
For most Linux distributions the ISO for burning a CD/DVD is available freely on the internet. In this post I'll assume you have already downloaded the bootable ISO image for the OS of your choice, but how to get the ISO image onto the USB stick?
The ISO file you have downloaded contains an image of the entire media. It includes all the files necessary to boot your PC/server. This image format is sadly not directly usable to copy onto the USB stick. We first need to convert the image from an ISO to a UDRW (Read/Write Universal Disk Image Format) which we can copy to the USB stick.
Some of the steps to create a bootable USB stick could be done in the GUI as well, but as some of them can't and you have to go to the shell anyway, I decided to do all of the steps in the shell.
Convert the ISO to UDRW format
Mac OS X provides all the tools needed to convert the ISO image to UDRW. The following command will convert the ISO image to the UDRW format.
You will notice that the destination_file.img from the command will create the file destination_file.img.dmg really. This is because the hdiutil program automatically adds the dmg file extension. This is not a problem as the file extension won't affect the format of the image.
Prepare the USB stick
Check your USB stick and make a backup if there is any important data on it, as the next steps are going to delete everything on it.
Usb Stick Computer
To prepare the USb stick we are going to delete all the partitions on the stick and create an empty partition. To do this we need to know the device name of the USB stick. Open a terminal and execute the following command:
You will see a list of disks and partitions. The goal is to identify the USB stick in this output. Depending on your system configuration your output might look different from this one. This appears to show 3 physical discs but it does not. The /dev/disk1 is a virtual disk created because of the partition encryption (FileVault 2) I enabled in Mac OS X.
As shown in the output above, the connected USB stick is a small 2.0 GB drive with a FAT partition on it. We are now going to remove this partition in the next step. For the following steps we will need the name of the disk which in this case is '/dev/disk2'.
With the following command the data on the disk (your USB stick) will be deleted!
With this command the USB stick was re-partitioned to have 1 partition without formatting and 100% of the size of the stick. If you check it again with 'diskutil list' you will see the changes already, also the USB stick will no longer be shown in the Finder.
Copy the image to the USB stick
Now we can copy the disk image we created to the USB stick. This is done via the dd(1) command. This command will copy the image to the disk (substitute the appropriate disk name for your USB stick here, as with the re-partitioning command):
The dd command does not show any output before it has finished the copy process, so be patient and wait for it to complete.
To eject the USB stick, use the above command. After this is done, the bootable USB stick is ready to be used.
Read more of my posts on my blog at https://blog.tinned-software.net/.
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