

- #MAKE A BOOTABLE USB START UP DISK FOR MAC OS X HOW TO#
- #MAKE A BOOTABLE USB START UP DISK FOR MAC OS X INSTALL#
You'll also benefit from USB 3, or USB Type C - this may be your only choice if you have a newer Mac. We recommend a Flash memory stick, rather than a standard hard drvie, as it will be quicker.

We recommend a 15GB (or more) drive - in fact more would be advisable: the installer for Big Sur was 13GB (and the actual installation takes up at least 35.5GB storage, so you'll need to allow for that on your Mac). Once you have those two things the process shouldn't take very long.
#MAKE A BOOTABLE USB START UP DISK FOR MAC OS X INSTALL#
There are two main things you'll need to make your bootable install drive: a USB stick (or a Thunderbolt drive) and the installation files. What you need to make a bootable USB for Mac If you want to run macOS on an external drive, which is slightly different, we have a separate article. Choose the correct createinstallmedia command.

We will run through the following steps to create a bootable USB for Mac: With that version of Mac OS X, and all versions since, it's been possible to use the Terminal command createinstallmedia to create a bootable installer of the macOS, in this article we'll show you how. Luckily, making a bootable installation of the Mac operating system became a whole lot easier when Apple launched OS X Mavericks back in 2013. It's also a hassle-free way to go back to an older version of macOS and a great option if you found downloading the installer took a long time and you don't fancy spending the next few days downloading it multiple times on multiple Macs. You can also use your bootable installer to install the macOS on a separate volume of your hard drive (or on a partition if you are running an older version of the Mac OS).
#MAKE A BOOTABLE USB START UP DISK FOR MAC OS X HOW TO#
If you want to find out how to make a bootable install of macOS Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, or an older version of Mac OS X or macOS, you've come to the right place. In this article we'll run through the steps necessary to create a bootable installer of the Mac operating system, whether it's so you can install the latest version of the macOS on multiple Macs, install the latest macOS beta, perform a clean install of the macOS, or just to be prepared with an emergency disk if your Mac experiences problems and you don't want to connect to the internet or in Recovery mode (or you can't access Recovery mode).
