Make Bootable El Capitan

To create bootable USB installer for Mac to Install Mac OS X El Capitan on Windows, on Mac or VirtualBox, you have to create bootable USB flash drive. Let’s get started on how to do it. First, you have to download TransMac software for Windows and install it on your computer.

  1. Create a bootable USB drive for macOS X versions including El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur.
  2. Use Terminal to Create the El Capitan Bootable USB Installer. Follow these steps to create a bootable USB installer of El Capitan in Terminal. Connect the USB flash drive to your Mac. Give the flash drive an appropriate name. You can do this by double-clicking the device's name on the desktop and then typing a new name.
  3. The El Capitan installer file came down to my Applications folder without problem, but multiple repeat attempts to create a bootable USB (16gb) drive using Diskmaker X 5 has failed. The program appears to go through all the steps, but finally the USB drive is never findable as a bootable drive.
A bootable installer is one of the fastest ways to install El Capitan. Rather than copy the installer to a local drive you can run it right off a USB disk (or Thunderbolt if you dare). Such a little USB drive would be similar to the sticks that came with the older MacBook Air, when we were all still sitting around wondering how you would ever install the OS on a computer with no optical media or Ethernet otherwise. Luckily, Apple loves us. To make a bootable USB/flash drive of El Capitan like the one that used to come with the MacBook Air, first name the USB drive. I’ll use mavinstall for the purposes of this article. The format should be Mac OS Extended Journaled. The installer is called Install OS X El Capitan and is by default located in the /Applications directory. Inside the app bundle, there’s a new binary called createinstallmedia (nested in Contents/Resources). Using this binary you can create an installation drive (similar to what we used to do with InstallESD). To do so, specify the –volume to create the drive on (note that the target volume will be erased), the path of the Install OS X El Capitan app bundle and then we’re going to select –nointeraction so it just runs through the whole thing

How To Make Bootable El Capitan

/Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/mavinstall --applicationpath /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app --nointeraction

Make Bootable El Capitan Usb On High Sierra

UsbNote: You’ll need to elevate your privileges for this to run. Once run you’ll see that it erases the disk, copies the Installation materials (InstallESX, etc) and then makes the drive bootable, as follows:

Make Bootable El Capitan Usb With Windows 10

Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 100%... Copying installer files to disk... Copy complete. Making disk bootable... Copying boot files... Copy complete. Then you can either select the new volume in the Startup Disk System Preference pane or boot the computer holding down the option key to select the new volume.

Make Bootable El Capitan Installer

Note: If you can do this on a system with a solid state drive it will be faster. Although this took 17 minutes last I ran it even then so be patient for the files to copy.