The IT Nerd

Current Macs don’t come with physical media anymore. So where does that leave you if you need to reinstall your OS? Well, Apple says to use the Recovery Partition to do it. That’s a special section of your hard drive that has everything you need to fix common issues and reinstall your OS. That’s great, but what if your hard disk is dead? Then you have a problem. This is the reason why I always create a bootable USB drive with the OS that my Mac currently runs. This is important because if you go to the Apple Store to have them put the OS back on your Mac, they will only put the OS that your Mac came with. That may be two or three versions behind.

So, how do you create a bootable USB drive? I’ll describe two ways of doing it. Then I will tell you which one I prefer:

Method 1: Diskmaker X

The easiest method to make a USB install drive is with the free program, Diskmaker X. Here’s all you need to do:

1. Download the El Capitan installer from the App Store and Diskmaker X.
2. Insert an 8GB (or larger) flash drive formatted for the Mac in the OS X Extended (Journaled) format using Disk Utility. Be advised that Diskmaker X will nuke everything on the drive. So either back it up or use a drive that can be erased.
3. Start DiskMaker X, choose El Capitan from the list of options, and follow the prompts.
4. Go away for 30 minutes. It will be done by the time you return.

Method 2: Use OS X to do it

I’ve had problems sometimes using Diskmaker X. But fortunately, OS X has its own way of doing this built into the OS. The catch is that you have to do way more work and be really comfortable with working from the OS X terminal. If that’s you, here’s what you do:

1. Download the El Capitan installer from the app store.
2. Insert an 8GB (or larger) flash drive and give it a name. In my case, I named it “ITNerd” (no quotes). Make sure the drive is formatted for OS X Extended (Journaled) using Disk Utility.
3. Open up Terminal by going to Applications –> Utilities.
4. Type (or copy and paste) this command into Terminal then press Enter: sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/ITNerd --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app --nointeraction
5. Type in your password when prompted and press Enter.
6. Go away for 30 minutes. It will be done by the time you return.

My preferred method is method 2, but feel free to use either method. One last piece of advice. Use a quality, name brand USB drive for this purpose. That ensures that you are less likely to discover that it does not work when you need it most.

This entry was posted on October 1, 2015 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Tips with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.