How To Make A Bootable Disc For Mac Catalina Average ratng: 5,9/10 9209 votes

My recent experience with water damage to my new 16-inch MacBook Pro reinforced two practices that I’ve followed for many years; making a bootable backup and creating a bootable macOS install drive. While I was able to reload my MacBook from the bootable backup drive, I know that it’s always good practice to have one drive — a cheap flash or hard drive — that can be booted for one purpose, that of doing a clean install of macOS. Diskmaker X has been my tool of choice for making bootable install drives for years, and in this article, I’ll show how to create one for macOS Catalina.

There are a lot of reasons for wanting to boot from an external drive. If you’d like to keep files synced between a desktop and laptop, expand your storage, or have a bootable backup copy of your system, there’s a hidden feature in Disk Utility that makes it easy. 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.

Method 3: Use TransMac to Create macOS Catalina Bootable USB in Windows 10. TransMac is a single-purpose utility to open Mac disk image from a Windows PC. It's one of the quickest methods to create macOS bootable USB drive from dmg file. However, the support for Catalina. How to create a bootable macOS High Sierra installer drive Put the macOS High Sierra installer on an external USB thumb drive or hard drive and use it to install the operating system on a Mac.

You can always use the Mac Terminal app to create a bootable installation disk, but DiskMaker X automates the process. The app is free, but a donation is suggested. With a blank external hard disk or flash drive at your fingertips, follow these instructions.

Download DiskMaker X 9

Click the DiskMaker X link in the first paragraph of this article and download a copy of DiskMaker X 9 to your Mac. Note that the developers of the app also have DiskMaker X versions available back to Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”, which is helpful if you wish to load older Macs with their original operating system versions. You can also create a single drive with installers for every Mac operating system back to Lion!

Install DiskMaker X 9

To install DiskMaker X 9, locate the installer disk image (.dmg) file. By default, it should be in the Downloads folder. Once you’ve located the installer, double click it to mount the disk image. A window similar to the one seen below appears:

Install DiskMaker X 9 on your Mac by dragging the app icon to the Applications folder alias as shown by the gray arrow on the installer window. Before you launch DiskMaker X 9, you need to download the macOS Catalina installer.

Download the macOS Catalina Installer

Have you already upgraded your Mac to Catalina? If you have, the installer probably isn’t in your Applicaitons folder. No problem! It’s available on the Mac App Store.

Bootable

If you have already installed Catalina, clicking the “Get” button in the Mac App Store will launch System Preferences > Software Update, and the following dialog appears:

Whether you’re running an earlier version of macOS or the latest, click the Download button to place the Catalina installer into the Applications folder of your Mac.

Have Your Drive Available

Earlier I mentioned that you need a drive of some sort. A USB Flash Drive is usable, although slow, as long as it has at least 8GB of capacity. OWC’s 16.0GB Performance Flash Drive is perfect for creating a bootable installation drive, and it’s very inexpensive.

For speedier installations, an inexpensive USB 3.0 drive like the 1TB OWC Express USB 3.0 is perfect, or if you want the fastest possible installation for a group of Macs, the 240GB SSD OWC Envoy Pro EX with Thunderbolt 3 is an inexpensive option.

DiskMaker X erases everything on the drive when you create the bootable macOS Catalina installation drive, so if you’re planning to use the same drive for other utilities or troubleshooting tools, or perhaps use it as a backup drive, do that after you’ve created the bootable installation drive.

Give DiskMaker X Authorization

macOS 10.15 Catalina uses a Privacy Control mechanism that causes multiple alerts to appear on your screen during the creation of the boot drive, so it’s necessary to give Accessibility authorization to “control your computer”. To do so:

  • Launch System Preferences from the Dock, the Applications folder, or from Apple () menu > System Preferences
  • Click Security and Privacy
  • Click the Privacy tab
  • Click Accessibility
  • Unlock the preference by clicking the lock icon in the lower-left corner of the System Preferences window, then enter your password or use Touch ID to continue
  • Drag the DiskMaker X 9 icon from the Finder to the right part of the window, or click the + button and select the DiskMaker X app in the Applications folder. DiskMaker X is added to the list of apps that can control your Mac (see screenshot below).

Be sure to remove this authorization once you’re done using DiskMaker X to create your bootable drive.

Note that there are other alerts that still appear when using DiskMaker X even though you have authorized this setting. Click OK when the alerts appear.

Launch DiskMaker X 9

Now we’re ready to make our bootable disk. Attach the drive to the Mac, make sure that the drive is visible from the Finder (in some cases a drive icon may appear on the Desktop), then launch DiskMaker X 9. If you’ve kept older macOS installers in your Applications folder, DiskMaker X asks which version of the operating system you want to use to make a boot disk. Select the version — in this case, macOS Catalina (10.15) — and then the following dialog appears:

To continue with the copy of the macOS installer that was found in /Applications, click “Use this copy”. If the installer is elsewhere, click “Use another copy…” to locate the installer file. Continuing, DiskMaker X 9 asks for the type of disk you’re using. In this example, I am using an OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini drive, so I click “Another kind of disk (erase only partition).”

Whatever drive you use will be completely erased. If you want to create a single disk that can install Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina, use Disk Utility (in the Applications/Utilities folder) to partition the drive into six separate volumes, one for each OS version.

For this example, my drive is named “OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini”, so I click on it to select it, then click “Choose this disk”.

Of course, DiskMaker X doesn’t want you to accidentally erase the wrong disk, so it asks if you really want to “Erase then create the disk”. If everything is the way you wanted, click the highlighted button (see image below).

We are go for launch! Now you will see a few more dialogs, one asking if you are in a light mood or wish to “come to the dark side” — that has to do with the type of disk icon that will be assigned to your boot disk, so make your choice.

Be aware that DiskMaker X 9 requests your administrator login and password, so be prepared to type (see screenshot above). You are also asked to give permission to DiskMaker X 9 to “access files on a removable volume” (your bootable install disk), so click OK when prompted as seen below.

During the disk creation process, temporary windows open and close, files are copied, and you may be asked if you wish to use your disk as a Time Machine backup drive — if this happens (and it may occur more than once) click “Don’t use”. You can do that later if you want to use the same bootable install disk as a Time Machine backup drive. If you’re running a virus protection app, it may ask if you wish to scan the disk; be sure to tell it to leave your disk alone!

You’ll know that DiskMaker X 9 is done when you hear a lion roar, and a dialog is displayed to inform you of the completion. At that point, you can reboot your Mac while holding down the Option (Alt) key to select a boot drive, or use System Preferences > Startup Disk to set the drive you just created as the boot drive.

If you like DiskMaker X 9, consider making a donation by clicking on the appropriate button.

Many thanks to Guillaume Gète and the rest of the DiskMaker X team.

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If you have more than one Mac you want to upgrade to macOS 10.15 Catalina but don't want to waste so much bandwidth downloading it for each machine, one option is to create a bootable installer on a spare USB flash drive. Here's how to do it with the Terminal.

One of the problems with the release of a major operating system update like macOS Catalina is the amount of times it has to be downloaded. As Apple usually intends each Mac or MacBook needing to be updated to download it, the process isn't really efficient enough for instances where many Mac desktops need the upgrade, like in a school or business if there isn't device management or macOS Content Caching for whatever the reason.

How To Make A Bootable Disc For Mac Catalina Bay

The strain could also be felt by users who own multiple Macs but also have a limited data allowance from their Internet provider, or a small amount of bandwidth that could make updating multiple machines take a very long time and saturate the available connection.

While in the olden days it was possible to get the software update on physical media, Apple doesn't offer that option anymore. However, it is still possible to create your own media, such as a spare USB thumb drive, that can do the same job.

The first hurdle is to actually get the macOS Catalina installer onto a Mac. This is an unavoidable part of the process and will require just over 8 gigabytes of drive capacity to store.

Go to the Mac App Store and search for Catalina using the search bar, then click on View next to the macOS Catalina listing. Alternately, open the Mac App Store Preview page for macOS Catalina here then select View in Mac App Store.

Click on Get. This will load up the Software Update utility, which will ask if you want to download macOS Catalina. Click Download.

After the download has finished, macOS will automatically start the installer. Press Command-Q to quit the installer before it continues, as the update will be deleted upon installation.

How To Make A Bootable Disc For Mac Catalina

Creating the Bootable Drive

You need an external drive to turn into a bootable version, and since it needs to be portable, your best choice is a USB thumb drive with a capacity of 16GB or more. Be aware that the drive will be wiped as part of the process, so ensure there isn't any precious data on the drive that could be lost if it isn't backed up elsewhere.

Connect the external drive to your Mac, and make a note of the external drive's name as it appears within macOS. This is important, as using the wrong name could lead to another connected drive being wiped by mistake.

Open Terminal within the Utilities folder within the Applications folder and enter in the following command by copying and pasting it directly into the window. Make sure to change the element titled 'USBdrive' for the name of the drive you intend to become the bootable installer.

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How To Create A Bootable Drive For Macos Catalina

sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia — volume /Volumes/USBdrive — /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app

Once pasted and corrected, press enter, then enter your password for macOS and press enter again.

Terminal will then warn of the USB drive being wiped as part of the process. Type 'Y' and press enter. Leave the Mac alone as it formats and copies over the installer.

Once Terminal says 'Install media now available,' it is safe to right-click the removable drive on the desktop renamed 'Install macOS Catalina' and select the 'Eject' command. It is now safe to remove the drive from the Mac.

Upgrading another Mac

Before proceeding, ensure there are adequate backups available for the Mac you are about to upgrade before the process starts.

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With the target Mac you want to upgrade turned off, connect your external drive. When turning on the Mac, hold down the Option key on the connected keyboard to bring up the Startup Manager.

The Startup Manager is used to boot from a different drive from the default. In this case, select 'Install macOS Catalina.'

The Mac will then bring up a macOS Utilities window. To perform a straight update, select 'Install macOS' and follow the prompts.

The macOS Utilities menu also allows you to erase the Mac's drive, which you can optionally do if you do not wish to save any of the data and want a completely clean slate for the installation.

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