macOS Catalina is a hugely exciting upgrade for the Mac. In some ways, it’s like having a completely new computer. You may have already taken the plunge and installed it, or maybe you’re waiting to see how it settles down before you install it. But whichever camp you’re in, it’s a good idea to create a bootable installer for macOS Catalina. That way, if anything goes badly wrong with your Mac, you’ll be able to boot from the installer and get going again quickly.
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To perform a clean re-install in Catalina, once in Recovery Mode, you need to delete your Data volume, that’s the one named Macintosh HD - Data, or something similar if you’re using a custom name, and to erase your System volume. In Recovery Mode select the Macintosh HD - Data volume at the left of Disk Utility’s window then. As you can see, it is pretty easy to create a recovery partition in Windows 10. To see the recovery partition you need to boot into advanced startup options. To do that, open the Settings app, go to “Update and Security - Recovery” and click on the “Restart Now” button under Advanced Startup. Reset local account passwords. With the system shutdown, power it on and hold down the Command + R keys during start-up to boot to the recovery partition. If the device has a firmware password.
- Learn how create a partition for Time Machine in Mac OS.Don't forget to check out our site for more free how-to videos!http://youtube.com/.
- Create your Windows 10 Recovery Partition In a drive with enough spare space, create a recovery partition at least as large as the recovery image. We chose to make it 270 GB, rather than 269, just.
Why do I need a bootable installer for macOS Catalina?
There are a number of reasons for creating a bootable USB Mac installer.
- If you have more than one Mac, it allows you to install Catalina on all your other Macs without having to download it from the App Store each time.
- You may want to clean install Catalina, in which case you’ll completely wipe your startup disk and will need to boot from an external drive to do that.
- It’s good protection against a catastrophe striking your Mac’s startup disk, especially if you don’t have a stable internet connection. Normally, if you need to reinstall macOS, you can just boot from the recovery partition and do it from there. However, that means re-downloading the installer. So, if you don’t have an internet connection or it’s very slow, you need an alternative.
What should I use as a bootable installer?
You can use an external hard drive, an SSD or a USB stick. Anything that has at least 16 GB of free space. You’ll need to create a new partition (or container if it’s formatted as AFPS) for the installer so if you have data on it you need, you should copy it to another drive first.
How to create a bootable USB drive for macOS Catalina
Whoa! Not so fast. There’s one more thing you should do before you create the installer: clear out the junk on your Mac. Before you undertake any major task on your Mac, and especially before you install a new version of the operating system, you should clear out junk and old files you no longer need. I don’t normally recommend software tools, but in this case, the nest way to clear out the clutter is to use CleanMyMac X. It can scan your Mac at the press of a button, identify all the files you don’t need, and allow you to get rid of them with one more click. Here’s how to use it:
- Install, and launch CleanMyMac X — download a free edition here
- Choose Smart Scan from the list of utilities in the sidebar.
- Press Scan.
- When it’s finished, press Run to delete files immediately, or Review Details to see what it has found.
Once you’ve cleared out the clutter, you can go ahead and create your bootable installer. Here’s how:
- Launch the App Store app and search for macOS Catalina. (If you’re reading this before Catalina has been launched, you’ll need to use the public beta. You can sign up for Apple’s public beta program and download it here Apple Beta Software Program)
- When the results appear, click on Catalina, then click ‘Get’.
- Wait for it to download. When it’s finished, the installer will launch. Quit it immediately.
The installer has now been saved in your Applications folder. You can go ahead and check, if you like. You now have two options for creating the installer. If you’re comfortable with using Terminal, you can go ahead and jump to the instructions for that, below. If you’d rather not use Terminal, there’s a neat utility called Diskmaker X that will do it for you. All you need to do is download and install it and then, when you run it, point it to the macOS Catalina installer you just downloaded. There are full instructions on the download page.
How to create a bootable installer using Terminal
- Plug the USB stick, hard drive or SSD into your Mac.
- Go to Applications>Utilities and double-click Disk Utility to launch it.
- Select the disk you want to use for the installer and choose the Erase tab.
- Choose APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format and choose GUID partition map from the options, if it’s available.
- Give the disk a name and press Erase.
- When it’s finished, quit Disk Utility.
- Go to Applications>Utilities and double-click Terminal to launch it.
- Type:
sudo /Applications/Install macOS Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia —volume /Volumes/Untitledwhere ‘Untitled’ is the name of your USB stick or external hard drive
- Press Return and wait for the word Done to appear in Terminal.
- Quit Terminal
You now have a macOS Catalina installer on an external disk or USB stick. Eject it, unplug it and keep it safe. You can use it to install Catalina on any Mac that supports it.
One more step: update applications
Once you’ve used tour new installer to install Catalina on a Mac, it’s a good idea to update all your applications so that that are Catalina compatible. You can do this manually, from the App Store and by launching non-App Store apps and choosing check for updates, but that’s a long and tedious process. It’s much quicker and easier to use the updates in CleanMyMac X. Here’s how you do it.
- Launch CleanMyMac X.
- Select the Updater tool in the Applications section.
- Press Select All.
- Press Update.
And that’s it. You’re done. CleanMyMac X checks all your installed apps for updates and then updates them all.
Creating a bootable installer for macOS Catalina isn’t difficult. If you have a spare disk or USB stick and are comfortable using Terminal, you can do it right away. If you’d rather not use Terminal, use the Diskmaker X tool described above. Whichever method you use, make sure you use CleanMyMac X to clear out the junk on your Mac before you start, and use it again to update your applications when you’ve finished.
Restoring from a Time Machine backup - at least for me - won’t furnish youwith a Recovery partition. This is bad news because the only official wayof getting a recovery partition is to reinstall macOS. This seems a littlecounter-intuitive because isn’t the point of backing up your computer so youdon’t have to reinstall your OS? Anyway, let’s get to creating yourrecovery partition without a reinstall or without 3rd party tools. It’seasier than you think!
Note that this process worked for me on macOS Sierra (10.12). I give nowarranties that this will work for you so backup first.
Background
As you probably already know, macOS won’t help create a recovery partition foryou and your OS will complain in these various ways:
- iCloud Find my Mac can’t be enabled
- FileVault (disk encryption) can’t be enabled
There’s a lot of info on the web about how to potentially resolve this,along with a number of 3rd party tools — and none of them worked for me. Thefirst one that was suggested was Carbon Copy Cloner and this won’t workbecause all it does it clone a Recovery HD, which means you actually need apartition to start with. I was also under the impression that would help youcreate one as well, but this isn’t possible on your boot disk. Finally,even when trying CCC from another Mac (and pointing it at my Macbook in TargetDisk Mode), it wouldn’t work either — though I can’t recall the specificreason. So CCC is out.
Next, there’s the suggestion of Recovery Partition Creator 4.x from Christopher Silvertooth.This AppleScript-based tool looks like it used to worked back in the day (10.9era) but it fails on Sierra; getting part way through and hanging. So, thisis out too. The script is saved as read-only so the raw source isn’tavailable but looking at what it does call (dmtestensureRecoveryPartition) lead me to a fully workable solution.
Solution
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Firstly, you’ll either need two Mac computers or the ability to boot yourcomputer off an external drive because the recovery partition creatordmtest can’t write to your boot drive. The latter is easy if you’ve got aspare cable for Target Disk Mode (hold down T as your computer starts up).If so, connect it to the second Mac, and start the machine you want a Recoverypartition on in Target Disk Mode.
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Otherwise, if you can boot a second disk (USB etc) connected to your targetcomputer, then just do so. I had a spare Mac on hand so that was much fasterand easier than installing macOS onto a USB.
After your second Mac/macOS install can see the disk you want to install arecovery partition onto (use either Disk Utility or diskutil list to checkits presence), do this:
Run this in a terminal after you have downloaded Sierra, or your OS, from theApp Store. Adjust the TARGET and MACOS_INSTALLER paths accordingly.
Essentially, we download the latest (easily) accessible Recovery drive .dmgwith dmtest in it, the utility that’s going to help us create the Recoverypartition, and then mount/use the .dmg inside the macOS installer to get thework done. Don’t mind that the dmtest is from Lion; it works just finewith Sierra. This won’t take long to run and the debugging messages in yourterminal tell you what percentage complete the process is.
Feel free to adapt this to your own paths or for different versions of macOS.
On the off-chance (read: very likely possibility) that Apple removes the LionRecovery HD installer, you can use the backup copy of dmtest that I’ve gotstored here. Note again that this file was from Lion and may or may not workwith any future macOS after 10.12.