Thursday, October 8, 2015

Make an El Capitan Boot USB Installer

This could not be easier nowadays.

Step 1 Get El Capitan
Go to the App Store and download it. When the applications starts just quit it.

Step 2 Verify Location
Go look in your applications folder, verify the install file is there.

Step 3 Get a Thumb Drive
Plug in a thumb drive that is big enough to hold the file. Note - This process will erase the thumb drive, so make sure you are OK with that. Make sure, when you mount the thumb drive it shows the volume name as 'Untitled'. If not, use Disk Utility to rename it or adjust the code I have painted in blue in step 4.

Step 4 Run this:

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

BEWARE - this is bad word wrap. Think about this. Apple have chosen to name the OS file with spaces i.e. OS space X space El space Capitan so you will see the '\' slashes used to escape the space as a special character. So there is a space after each '\'.

Here it is again in a tiny font so you get the idea.

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

This will start the process, when it completes you can test by rebooting with the option key as normal. This process also works for cheap small external drives or any kind of storage you like.

Cheers!

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