The process of installing OS X or macOS on a Mac hasn't changed a great deal since altered the delivery of the OS from optical disks to electronic downloads, using the. The big advantage to downloading the Mac OS is, of course, immediate gratification (and not having to pay shipping charges). But the downside is that the installer you download is deleted as soon as you make use of it by installing the Mac operating system. With the installer gone, you lose the opportunity to install the OS on more than one Mac without having to go through the download process again. You also lose out on having an installer that you can use to perform that completely overwrite your startup drive, or having an emergency bootable installer that includes a few useful utilities that can bail you out of an emergency. To overcome these limitations of the installer for OS X or macOS, all you need is a USB drive that contains a bootable copy of the installer.
If you’re already on Ubuntu, you don’t need a Windows or Mac computer to create a bootable USB drive with Ubuntu – you can do it straight from your current OS. The Ubuntu distribution includes an extremely helpful tool called Startup Disk Creator – this will allow you to create a bootable USB drive from an ISO file.
With help from Terminal and a super secret command included with the Mac OS installer, you can create a bootable installer to use for all your Macs. Screen shot courtesy of Coyote Moon, Inc.
There are two ways to make a bootable copy of the installer; one makes use of, the command-line utility included with all copies of OS X and macOS; the other uses a combination of the,, and Terminal to get the job done. In the past, I've always shown you the manual method, which uses the Finder, Disk Utility, and Terminal. Although this method involves more steps, it's easier for many Mac users because the majority of the process uses familiar tools. Music notes app for mac os. This time around, I'm going to show you the Terminal app method, which uses a single command that has been included with the Mac OS installer since OS X Mavericks was released. Please note: The is the last version of the installer with which we verified this manual method using the Finder, Disk Utility, and Terminal. The general recommendation is to skip the manual method for any version of the Mac OS that is newer than OS X Mavericks, and instead use the Terminal method and the createinstallmedia command, as outlined below.
Before you begin, stop. That may sound a bit daft, but as I mentioned above, if you use the OS X or macOS installer, it will likely delete itself from your Mac as part of the installation process. So, if you haven't yet used the installer you downloaded, don't. If you've already installed the Mac OS, you can re-download the installer following these instructions: • If you're just now downloading the installer, you'll notice that once the download is complete, the installer will start up on its own.