UPDATED 2/11: If you’re a Mac OS X user the time will come when your computer won’t boot or a problem may arise where you can’t take control of the device, and booting from an OS X installation media will be required. This is why it’s recommended that you make a Mac OS X bootable USB when your Mac is in working conditions.
However, if you find yourself on a scenario where your device (iMac, MacBook Pro, Air, Mac Pro or Mini) is not responding and you happen to have a Windows PC, then you can still be able to easily make a USB bootable installation media for your Mac OS X to reinstall the operating system using the Recovery Assistant. Bear in mind that this will also work for Windows users, who are running Mac OS X on a virtual machine and need to upgrade to the latest version. For example, to OS X Yosemite. Things to know before proceeding Before you dive into this guide, you’ll need a few things:. A broken Mac computer with Mac OS X. A trial copy of the TransMac software. One high quality USB flash drive with 16GB of storage.
Jan 18, 2018 - Apple stripped the ability to make Windows 10 install media from a flash drive or external SSD in Sierra. Get the Lowest Prices anywhere on Macs, iPads and Apple Watches: Apple Price Guides updated April 16th. This will format the drive suitable for a UEFI boot, name it 'WINDOWS10,' and mount it. Newer Mac computers use a streamlined method to install Windows. If they aren't available, use a USB keyboard and mouse. A Windows ISO image (a disk.
A copy of Apple’s macOS (DMG file). Now that you have all the necessary ingredients, you’re ready to make a Mac OS X bootable USB using the DMG file of the operating system with the steps below. How to create Mac OS X bootable USB installation media Before you can use TransMac, you may first need to partition your USB flash drive with a GPT partition, as a normal MBR partition may not work.
To do this, you’ll need to use the Diskpart command-line utility on Windows. Setting up GPT partition To set up a USB drive with a GPT partition, use these steps:. Open Command Prompt with administrative permissions.
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Type the diskpart command and press Enter. Type the list disk command to view a listing of drives connected to your computer and press Enter. Type the select disk command followed the number assigned for the USB flash drive (e.g., select disk 4), and press Enter. Type the clean command and press Enter. Type the convert GPT command and press Enter. Type the create partition primary command and press Enter to complete the task.
After converting the USB flash drive from MBR to GPT format, you can use the steps below to create a bootable USB installation media to install Mac OS X. Creating USB install media To create a bootable media to install Mac OS X, use these steps:., which is the software that will make everything happen. TransMac is a paid software, but it has a 15-day trial solution, that give us more than enough time to move the DMG files to the USB drive from Windows.
(If you want to support the developer, you can purchase the full version.). Insert the USB drive that you’ll use to fix your installation of OS X. Remember that all the data in the USB will be erased. Make sure you take off any important documents. Right-click the TransMac software icon and Run as administrator. You’ll be prompted to Enter Key or Run, because we’ll be using it once, click Run. On the left pane, you’ll see all the Windows PC drives listed, right-click the USB drive you’re intending to use to reinstall Apple’s OS X and click Restore with Disk Image.
In the warning dialog box, click Yes. Use the Restore Disk Image to Drive dialog box to browse for the DMG file with the installation files for Mac OS X Yosemite in this case, and click OK to create a bootable USB of the operating system. Now, you’ll have to wait a long time. It could take one or two hours to complete the process depending on your computer and other variables. Once your bootable USB installation media is ready, remove it and insert it into your Mac, power it on, holding down the Option key, and select the USB you just created to reinstall Mac OS X.I've got a small favor to ask.
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My MBA 2012 with OS X 10.9.4 Mavericks won't boot anymore - it simply freezes after the initial jingle. I already tried resetting NVRAM and SMC, but to no avail. I don't have any time machine backups. However, I still have a disc image of Mavericks sitting on an external hard drive, a USB stick and access to a notebook with Windows 7. I haven't yet found any tutorial on how to create a bootable USB drive on Windows in order to reinstall OS X on my beloved Macbook Air.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! According to the first answer here, there's a tool with a free trial called TransMac that can do it. Just make sure the USB drive is formatted with GPT and not MBR.
What might be easier, however, is that that model has support for Internet Recovery. If you boot holding Command-R and you have a WiFi connection, it can actually boot into recovery mode without a recovery partition on a drive (or even without a working drive). Having said that, your description of a crash right after the boot chime could signify a more serious hardware problem and you may not be able to boot anything. If you boot holding the option key down, the startup disk selection screen should appear. If it crashes anyways, you may be looking at a hardware problem.
I know this question is old but it is still valid. I was never able to write a Mac installer image to my Flash Drive and have it bootable, unless I did it on a Mac.
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Using Michael D. Dryden's, I was able to use the Diskpart command to clean and prep a GPT partition on a flash drive for an OSX Mavericks install image. I used TransMac on Windows 7 to restore the image file I had to the Flash Drive, it created a bootable Mac image on my flash drive.
Someone had reported that the method for using DISKPART did not work, but I have done this twice and it works remarkably well, and it's the only method I could find to create a Mac-Bootable Flash. I've been trying to post this to confirm that it works for some time, I just hope it helps someone else, because it is a very easy solution. Here are the Diskpart commands used to prep the Flash Drive, just to have them here in case my Link does not work: diskpart DISKPART list disk (Find the disk number) DISKPART select disk x (from result of List Disk) Disk x is now the selected disk. DISKPART clean DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk. DISKPART convert gpt DiskPart successfully converted the selected disk to GPT format.
DISKPART create partition primary Note: I use 'Rufus' for all other USB writing and formatting for Windows systems, it's a great app, but I had previously tried to format the drive as GPT using that, as a Fat32 partition. When I tried to inject the image, Transmac told me that the drive was 'write protected'. So basically, the USB drive cannot have any high level formatting, the Windows system should detect the drive as 'not formatted' for this to work, which it will if prepped right with Diskpart. I had this problem with a friend computer, it was an old iMac and I'll tell you it is not going to be easy. The first thing you have to do is make sure what model you have (the year when your computer has been released) then check on the official apple website to see what is the latest macOS or Mac OS X version available for you computer.
In most of the new mac computer, you can just press cmd+r while booting and the mac will automatically download everything you need to install the system, but the oldest does not have this tool. In this case, you have to download the dmg file, that can be found on the web, for example, one websites that provides some macOS and Mac OS X is (for El Capitan, if you need another version, I'm sorry but you have to search for it). Here things start to get a little tricky. First of all you have to flash the image on a USB drive, I recommend etcher, that works on everything (Mac, Linux and Windows too) it's extremely easy to use and you just need to select the drive and the image and etcher will do everything by itself, plus it's free. When the USB drive is ready you can plug it in you mac and press alt (option) while booting, you have inserted a firmware password, it will ask you to unlock the firmware by inserting that password, else it will take you to all the bootable drives, including your USB device. If you see the mac logo with a stop icon over it, it means that you downloaded a too new version that is not supported from your mac, else it will start.
When it start, it won't install, saying that the system can't verify the downloaded image, that's why you have to navigate on the 'utilities' menu on the top bar and open the terminal. Now you have to choices, change the date & time, which can work, but may not. That's basically because every image of mac has a certificate that can expire, so, if the certificate is expired you won't be able to make it work, unless you change the date (the date is different from mac version to mac version, so based on that you have to change it, usually just search for when was that version released and se the current date to that date or even one or two days later to make it work).
Then try to install the system, if this does not work again, you can start the installation without verifying the image, but you should really trust the image you're using from being corrupted or modified (just to make sure the download went right, use the SHA-1 code to make the file has been downloaded right). So, to proceed without verifying the image, from terminal, type in this command: sudo defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify true then, start the installation. (Is possible that you won't need the sudo at the begin, in that case just remove it from the command and start from 'defaults') Now you should be able to install macOS from a USB drive. Just a little thing, make sure to have formatted the disk before proceeding, I would recommend to make a partition that takes the whole disk in mac Journaled format, then if you want you will be able to encrypt the disk (the installer will ask you to do that later), instead, if the disk was encrypted before, you will have to insert the encryption key of the disk to continue the installation process. Really hope this help, I spent a lot of hours to do this on a really old iMac from 2008. And not it works!