When OS X shipped on a DVD a good number of years ago, you always had the convenience of a bootable installer—an OS X installer that could be used to boot your Mac if its own drive was having problems. But to install or reinstall a recent version of OS X, you must either download a non-bootable installer from the Mac App Store or (via OS X’s invisible, bootable recovery partition) download 6GB of installer data from Apple’s servers during the installation process. In other words, you no longer have the same safety net or convenience.
Put the iso on a usb stick (drag it into your mac hard drive and mount it) format your usb stick with the disk utility tool. (Make sure the usb is partitioned as mac bootable then use use the image recovery and put your mounted OS X iso into the source and your usb as the location.) restart your computer while holding down the option key. The program then tells you it’s copying the installer files, making the disk bootable, and copying boot files. Download the Yosemite installer from the Mac App Store and make sure it’s in.
Because of this, I recommend creating your own bootable El Capitan (OS X 10.11) installer drive on an external hard drive or USB thumb drive. If you need to install El Capitan on multiple Macs, using a bootable installer drive is faster and more convenient than downloading or copying the entire installer to each computer. If you want to erase the drive on a Mac before installing El Capitan, or start over at any time, you can use a dedicated installer drive to boot that Mac, erase its drive, and then install the OS (and subsequently restore whatever data you need from your backups). And if your Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable installer drive makes a handy emergency disk.
(OS X Recovery lets you repair your drive and reinstall OS X, but to perform the latter task, you must wait—each time you use it—for the entire 6GB of installer data to download. At best, that’s a hassle; at worst, it’s hours of waiting before you can get started.)
As with previous versions of OS X, it’s not difficult to create a bootable installer drive, but it’s not obvious, either. I show you how, below.
Keep the installer safe
Like all recent versions of OS X, El Capitan is distributed through the Mac App Store: You download an installer app (called Install OS X El Capitan.app) to your Applications folder. In this respect, the OS X installer is just like any other app you buy from the Mac App Store. However, unlike any other app, if you run the OS X installer from that default location, the app deletes itself after it’s done installing OS X.
If you plan to use the OS X installer on other Macs, or—in this case—to create a bootable installer drive, be sure to copy the installer to another drive, or at least move it out of the Applications folder, before you use it to install the OS on your Mac. If you don’t, you’ll have to redownload the installer from the Mac App Store before you can use the instructions below.
What you need
To create a bootable El Capitan installer drive, you need the El Capitan installer from the Mac App Store and a Mac-formatted drive that’s big enough to hold the installer and all its data. This can be a hard drive, a solid-state drive (SSD), a thumb drive, or a USB stick—an 8GB thumb drive is perfect. Your drive must be formatted as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume with a GUID Partition Table. (Follow this tutorial to properly format the drive if you’re using OS X Yosemite or older. If you’re using OS X El Capitan, use these instructions.)
Your OS X user account must also have administrator privileges.
Apple’s gift: createinstallmedia
In my articles on creating a bootable installer drive for older versions of OS X, I provided three, or even four, different ways to perform the procedure, depending on which version of OS X you were running, your comfort level with Terminal, and other factors. That approach made sense in the past, but a number of the reasons for it no longer apply, so this year I’m limiting the instructions to a single method: using OS X’s own createinstallmedia tool.
Starting with Mavericks, the OS X installer hosts a hidden Unix program called createinstallmedia specifically for creating a bootable installer drive. Using it requires the use of Terminal, but createinstallmedia works well, it’s official, and performing the procedure requires little more than copying and pasting.
The only real drawback to createinstallmedia is that it doesn’t work under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard—it requires OS X 10.7 Lion or later. Though it’s true that some Macs still running Snow Leopard can upgrade to El Capitan, I think it’s safe to assume that most people installing OS X 10.11 will have access to a Mac running 10.7 or later.
(If you absolutely refuse to go near Terminal, an El Capitan-compatible version of DiskMaker X is now available, although I haven’t yet had the chance to test it.)
Making the installer drive
- Connect to your Mac a properly formatted 8GB (or larger) drive, and rename the drive
Untitled. (The Terminal commands I provide here assume that the drive is named Untitled. If the drive isn’t named Untitled, the procedure won’t work.) - Make sure the El Capitan installer (or at least a copy of it), called Install OS X El Capitan.app, is in its default location in your main Applications folder (/Applications).
- Select the text of the following Terminal command and copy it. Note that the window that displays the command scrolls to the right.
- Launch Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities).
- Warning: This step will erase the destination drive or partition, so make sure that it doesn’t contain any valuable data. Paste the copied command into Terminal and press Return.
- Type your admin-level account password when prompted, and then press Return.
- You may see the message “To continue we need to erase the disk at /Volumes/Untitled. If you wish to continue type (Y) then press return:” If so, type the letter Y and then press Return. If you don’t see this message, you’re already set.
The Terminal window displays createinstallmedia’s progress as a textual representation of a progress bar: Erasing Disk: 0%… 10 percent…20 percent… and so on. You also see a list of the program’s tasks as they occur: Copying installer files to disk…Copy complete.Making disk bootable…Copying boot files…Copy complete. The procedure can take as little as a couple minutes, or as long as 20 to 30 minutes, depending on how fast your Mac can copy data to the destination drive. Once you see Copy Complete. Done., as shown in the screenshot above, the process has finished.
Createinstallmedia will have renamed your drive from Untitled to Install OS X El Capitan. You can rename the drive (in the Finder) if you like—renaming it won’t prevent it from working properly.
Booting from the installer drive
You can boot any El Capitan-compatible Mac from your new installer drive. First, connect the drive to your Mac. Then, restart your Mac (or, if it’s currently shut down, start it up) while holding down the Option key. When OS X’s Startup Manager appears, select the installer drive and then click the arrow below it to proceed with startup. (Alternatively, if your Mac is already booted into OS X, you may be able to choose the installer drive in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences, and then click restart. However, sometimes OS X installer drives don’t appear in the Startup Disk window.)
Once booted from your installer drive, you can perform any of the tasks available from the OS X installer’s special recovery and restore features. In fact, you’ll see the same OS X Utilities screen you get when you boot into OS X Recovery—but unlike with recovery mode, your bootable installer includes the entire installer.
Creating USB driver in the latest Windows version has become a lot easier with the in-built ISO burners. Gone are the days when you used to download an ISO image file of the operating system and burn it into CD/DVD. USB flash drives has completely destroyed the usage of CD/DVDs and the main reason is its size, speed and portability. Bootable USB drivers simply means that you are preparing a USB flash drive to install an operating system. Essentially, creating bootable USB drivers to install operating system of your choice varies from each Windows and Mac versions.
In this short guide, we will show how to make or create a bootable USB from ISO file on all Windows version computers. Making a bootable driver is not similar to copying an ISO image file directly on the USB flash drive. Before creating a bootable USB from ISO, please remember to backup all data contained on your USB flash drive as using any trick from this guide will entirely wipe the data from your USB drive.
If you're locked out of Windows 7 and can't recall the password at all, don't worry, resetting Windows 7 password will be extremely easy with the help of Windows Password Recovery Pro.
Method #1: Make Bootable USB from ISO Using Command Prompt
This part can be applied from any Windows version including Windows 10, 8, 7, XP and other older versions. It is indeed an old-fashioned method but it works like charm all the time. Here's what to do –
Step 1. Insert the USB flash drive on the computer and let the computer automatically detect it.
Step 2. Click on Start and start command prompt.
Step 3. Type 'DISKPART' and press enter to start the disk part utility.
Step 4. From here, you will have to enter a series of command. First, type 'List Disk' to see all the available drivers on the computer. Check the disk number of your flash drive and remember it.
Step 5. Next, type 'Select Disk 1' considering Disk 1 is the USB flash driver and press Enter.
Step 6. Now keep on typing these series of commands.
- Clean
- create partition primary
- select partition 1
- active
- format fs=fat32
When the formatting process is completed, simply type 'Assign' followed by exit.
Step 7. Now copy all the files of your operating system on to the USB flash drive and it is done. You can now install your operating system using the bootable USB flash drive.
Method #2: Create A Bootable USB using iSeePassword WizISO
Making a Windows install disk isn't as simple as formatting a drive or copying ISO file to your USB drive on Windows and Mac OS X. You need to use a professional ISO Editor to write the ISO image to your USB instead of copying. Are you confused with the steps mentioned in above parts or they just didn't work? If that was the case, then it is the time to give a try on iSeePassword WizISO, it's an amazing tool to burn ISO image to USB with a built powerful burning engine.
WizISO a ISO Toolkit which allows you to burn ,extract, edit, create and copy disc without losing the bootable information. This program provides two partition style MBR and UEFI model which allows you to make UEFI bootable drive. What's more. If you want to edit your ISO file,then just import it to the program and directly edit, add, delete, rename your ISO file then save it to a standard ISO format. . It supports 200+ USB brands mo matter it is old or new. The most important part is that it is super easy to use. Not convinced? Please check the tutorial below:
Step 1. Download iSeePassword WizISO from this website and install it on the computer. (Windows version and Mac version all available).
Step 2. Open the program after installation and the main interface is shown like blow.
Step 3. Click 'Browse' button to find local ISO file and add it to computer.
Step 4. Now insert an USB drive to the computer and select the drive name from the list undert 'Create A Bootable USB'.
Step 5. Finally, click 'Burn' button to start the burning process. It will take around 15 minutes to fully write the ISO file to USB. The actual time is depending on how lagre the file is. After that, you can take out the USB and use it to fix system issues.
Pro:
- High success rate with strong burning engine.
- User-friendly interface that everyone can use it freely.
- Take less time for burning.
- Support both DVD and USB as burning media.
- Automatically detect correct file format before burning.
Method #3: Make Bootable USB from ISO using RMPrepUSB
RMPrepUSB is yet another ISO image file burning program that helps to create bootable USB flash drives. It is absolutely free to use and it's an open source tool. Learn how to use Rufus.
Step 1. Download it from the official website and store it on your computer.
Step 2. It's ready-to-use program that needs no installation at all. You can open the program just by double clicking on it.
Step 3. Insert the USB flash drive and let it be recognized by the program automatically.
Step 4. Select the device name that you are using. It is recommended to use an 8 GB flash drive to run everything smoothly. Leave the rest of the options to the default settings and select the ISO image file stored in your computer. Make sure to check 'Create a bootable disk' to make the USB driver bootable.
Step 5. Click on 'Start' to initiate the burning process and once it is finished, you can eject the flash drive. It now a ready-made bootable USB driver.
Cons:
Make Bootable Disk Mac El Capitan
- Quite complicated, not intended for the beginner.
- Don't support UEFI boot.
- Don't provide any support.
Make Bootable Disk Mac Mojave
Creating a bootable USB flash drive can be really a hectic task if you don't know the right procedure. Hopefully, you guys were able to create a bootable USB driver by using the methods shared in this guide. If you have any easier method than this then don't forget to share it with us. Stay tuned for more!
Make Bootable Disk Mac Catalina