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You also see a list of the program’s tasks as they occur: Copying installer files to disk… Copy complete. The Terminal window displays createinstallmedia’s progress as a textual representation of a progress bar: Erasing Disk: 0%… 10 percent…20 percent… and so on. If you don’t see this message, you’re already set. If you wish to continue type (Y) then press return:” If so, type the letter Y and then press Return.

You may see the message “To continue we need to erase the disk at /Volumes/Untitled.

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Type your admin-level account password when prompted, and then press Return.

Paste the copied command into Terminal and press Return.

Warning: This step will erase the destination drive or partition, so make sure that it doesn’t contain any valuable data.

Launch Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities).

Sudo /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume /Volumes/Untitled -applicationpath /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app Note that the window that displays the command scrolls to the right.

Select the text of the following Terminal command and copy it.

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Make sure the El Capitan installer (or at least a copy of it), called Install OS X El Capitan.app, is in its default location in your main Applications folder (/Applications).If the drive isn’t named Untitled, the procedure won’t work.) (The Terminal commands I provide here assume that the drive is named Untitled.

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Connect to your Mac a properly formatted 8GB (or larger) drive, and rename the drive Untitled.

Your OS X user account must also have administrator privileges. If you’re using OS X El Capitan, use these instructions.) (Follow this tutorial to properly format the drive if you’re using OS X Yosemite or older.

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Your drive must be formatted as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume with a GUID Partition Table. This can be a hard drive, a solid-state drive (SSD), a thumb drive, or a USB stick-an 8GB thumb drive is perfect. To create a bootable El Capitan installer drive, you need the El Capitan installer from the Mac App Store and a Mac-formatted drive that’s big enough to hold the installer and all its data. If you don’t, you’ll have to redownload the installer from the Mac App Store before you can use the instructions below.

If you plan to use the OS X installer on other Macs, or-in this case-to create a bootable installer drive, be sure to copy the installer to another drive, or at least move it out of the Applications folder, before you use it to install the OS on your Mac. However, unlike any other app, if you run the OS X installer from that default location, the app deletes itself after it’s done installing OS X. In this respect, the OS X installer is just like any other app you buy from the Mac App Store.

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Like all recent versions of OS X, El Capitan is distributed through the Mac App Store: You download an installer app (called Install OS X El Capitan.app) to your Applications folder. At best, that’s a hassle at worst, it’s hours of waiting before you can get started.)Īs with previous versions of OS X, it’s not difficult to create a bootable installer drive, but it’s not obvious, either. ( OS X Recovery lets you repair your drive and reinstall OS X, but to perform the latter task, you must wait-each time you use it-for the entire 6GB of installer data to download.

And if your Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable installer drive makes a handy emergency disk. If you want to erase the drive on a Mac before installing El Capitan, or start over at any time, you can use a dedicated installer drive to boot that Mac, erase its drive, and then install the OS (and subsequently restore whatever data you need from your backups). If you need to install El Capitan on multiple Macs, using a bootable installer drive is faster and more convenient than downloading or copying the entire installer to each computer. In other words, you no longer have the same safety net or convenience.īecause of this, I recommend creating your own bootable El Capitan (OS X 10.11) installer drive on an external hard drive or USB thumb drive. But to install or reinstall a recent version of OS X, you must either download a non-bootable installer from the Mac App Store or (via OS X’s invisible, bootable recovery partition) download 6GB of installer data from Apple’s servers during the installation process.

When OS X shipped on a DVD a good number of years ago, you always had the convenience of a bootable installer-an OS X installer that could be used to boot your Mac if its own drive was having problems.