Since this is the first version of the public release of macOS Sierra, you might want to create a separate partition on your Mac and install Sierra as a dual boot system with Mac OS X El Capitan. That way, you can play around with Sierra and easily switch back to El Capitan if you end up not liking the new operating system. In spite of these slight setbacks, mac OS High Sierra was an excellent attempt that helped lay the groundwork for the future of Apple’s products. To better explain, the article is provided by macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 download DMG. The El Capitan installer is downloaded to the /Applications folder, with the file name Install OS X El Capitan. If you have already installed El Capitan and wish to now create a bootable installer, you can force the Mac App Store to re-download the installer. Once you installed macOS 10.13 High Sierra follows the below steps and create a Bootable USB for mac on Windows 10. MacOS sierra bootable USB. MacOS Sierra bootable USB, DiskMaker X 6 is another Application which allows you to create bootable USB on a Mac. Diskmaker x 6 is an open source application which has built with AppleScript. Step 1: To begin, download macOS High Sierra 10.13 installer app from the Mac App Store. The app will be titled, “Install macOS High Sierra”. Step 2: Connect the aforementioned USB flash drive to your Mac, and then launch the Disk Utility app to format the connected flash drive.
To perform a clean installation of macOS Sierra (basically, Mac OS X 10.12), I recommend using a bootable USB flash drive containing the macOS Sierra installer. Below are the steps I took to create the bootable USB flash drive and how I used it to install macOS Sierra.
Note: The macOS Sierra Disk Utility and installer appears to be more buggy and much slower than previous versions. The best advice for installing macOS Sierra is to try again and be very patient (if you expect an operation to complete in 5 minutes, then give it at least 50 minutes).
Download macOS Sierra Installer
The macOS Sierra installer is available from the Mac App Store. Run the “App Store” application, search for “macOS Sierra”, and download it. It will save the installer as an “/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app” file (about 4.97GB in size).
Note: If you run the macOS Sierra installer to upgrade your Mac, the downloaded file will be deleted automatically after the upgrade is completed. To keep that file, you will want to move it out of the Applications folder so it won’t be deleted after an upgrade. Launch the “Terminal” application and run this command to move the downloaded installer to your user’s “Downloads” folder:
sudomv/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app/ ~/Downloads/
If you are paranoid (doesn’t hurt), you can verify that the installer file was downloaded correctly by verify its checksum. Run the “Terminal” application and this command:
hdiutil verify /Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg
# If successful, the last output line should read:
# hdiutil: verify: checksum of '/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg' is VALID
# If successful, the last output line should read:
# hdiutil: verify: checksum of '/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg' is VALID
Format USB Flash Drive
The macOS Sierra installer takes up 5.1GB of space on the USB flash drive, so you will need a flash drive with a capacity of 8GB or greater.
Note: If the flash drive is mounted under “/Volumes” successfully when you plug it in, you can skip the following steps to reformat the flash drive. This is because the script we run to create the bootable drive will reformat the flash drive as an initial step. Because I am paranoid, I recommend reformatting the USB flash drive manually anyhow.
Format the USB flash drive using these steps:
- Plug the USB flash drive into your Mac.
- Launch the “Disk Utility” application.
- On the left-hand pane, select the USB drive (not the partition under it, if any).
- Click on the “Erase” tab (or button at the top).
- Input a name like “Sierra” (this name will be overwritten later).
- Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” for “Format”.
- Select “Master Boot Record” for “Scheme”.
- Click the “Erase…” button at the bottom. Click the “Erase” button in the warning popup dialog if you get one.
- The format operation may take several minutes to complete. (USB 2.0 and large capacity drives will take longer.) After the format completes, the partition will be mounted under “/Volumes/Sierra” (or whatever name you selected above).
- Note: Under macOS Sierra, the Erase function will fail if the USB drive’s partition is mounted. You can manually unmount the partition before running Erase. Or you can run Erase twice; the first time will unmount the partition and fail, and the second time will actually do the format (which will succeed).
- Close the “Disk Utility” application.
Create Bootable USB Flash Drive Installer
To create the bootable USB macOS Sierra installer, run the “Terminal” application and this command:
# The --volume value is the mounted USB flash drive partition; in this case, named /Volumes/Sierra
sudo/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume/Volumes/Sierra --applicationpath/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app --nointeraction
# You will be prompted for your user's administrative password.
sudo/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume/Volumes/Sierra --applicationpath/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app --nointeraction
# You will be prompted for your user's administrative password.
Update: For macOS 10.14 Mojave (and its predecessor, macOS 10.13 High Sierra), the createinstallmedia command no longer requires the “–applicationpath” and “–nointeraction” flags, so omit them. The command becomes just “createinstallmedia –volume /Volumes/Mojave”.
Note: If the createinstallmedia command returns a “Failed to start erase of disk due to error (-9999, 0)” error, then your current Mac OS X version does not fully support the createinstallmedia tool. Instead, create the USB installation drive manually using instructions from Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
The “createinstallmedia” program will erase the USB flash drive, create a new partition named “Install macOS Sierra”, and copy the installation files to that partition. The output will look like:
Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 30%...100%...
Copying installer files to disk...
Copy complete.
Making disk bootable...
Copying boot files...
Copy complete.
Done.
Copying installer files to disk...
Copy complete.
Making disk bootable...
Copying boot files...
Copy complete.
Done.
The program will pause at the “Copying installer files to disk…” output line above. This step took 20-30 minutes with my Kingston 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive. Yours may take a shorter or longer time. I recommend giving it at least an hour, maybe two, before giving up.
Note: Mac hardware is very finicky about USB flash drives. Initially, I used a Corsair 32GB USB 3.0 drive; however, when I held down the Option key to try to boot with it, the Mac would freeze with a black startup screen. The Kingston 16GB USB 2.0 drive did not have this problem. So if you enounter issues (when erasing and copying) or weirdness (when booting), consider changing to another brand of USB flash drive. If you don’t have another drive, consider at least testing the flash drive to make sure it is not bad or corrupted (“First Aid” in “Disk Utility” is the minimum; google for more powerful tools).
Boot With USB Flash Drive
Note: I recommending connecting the Mac to its AC power adapter before beginning the macOS Sierra installation. The installation may take a long time (an hour or more) and you don’t want the battery to die in the middle.
To boot a Mac with the USB flash drive:
- Shutdown the Mac.
- Insert the USB flash drive.
- While holding the “option/alt” key down, turn on the Mac to display the boot Startup Manager.
- You should see one or more icons, one of which should be called “Install macOS Sierra” for the USB flash drive. (The internal hard drive may not be visible if it does not have a valid, bootable partition installed.)
- Note: If you don’t see the USB flash drive’s “Install macOS Sierra”, try removing and re-inserting the USB flash drive while viewing the Startup Manager screen. The USB flash drive should then appear after a few seconds.
- Select the “Install macOS Sierra” (with left/right arrow keys) and hit the “return/enter” key to boot from the USB flash drive.
It may take 5-10 minutes or longer to load the installer from the USB flash drive. Sometimes the progress bar may appear to be frozen… just be patient. I would give it at least 30-60 minutes to load before giving up.
Format the Hard Drive
When the installer finishes loading, you will see a “macOS Utilities” window appear. Do the following to format the internal hard drive:
Mac Os High Sierra Dmg Bootable Usb Download
- Click on the “Disk Utility” option and click the “Continue” button on the bottom to launch the “Disk Utility” application.
- On the left-hand pane, select the hard drive (not the partition under it, if any).
- Click on the “Erase” button at the top.
- Input a name like “macOS”.
- Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” for “Format”.
- Select “GUID Partition Map” for “Scheme”.
- Click the “Erase…” button at the bottom.
- For SSD (Solid State Drive), the format operation may take less than a minute to complete. For mechanical hard drive, it may several minutes to hours, depending upon the size, speed, and condition of your hard drive.
- Note: Again, the Erase function will fail if the hard drive’s partition is mounted. You can manually unmount the partition before running Erase. Or you can run Erase twice; the first time will unmount the partition and fail, and the second time will actually do the format (which will succeed).
- Close the “Disk Utility” application.
Note: Now and then, I noticed the output of the Erase seems to erroneously double the size of the hard drive. For a 128GB hard drive, the graph shows 120.88GB macOS (in blue) and 120.37 GB Unformatted (in red). I think it is just a user interface bug because when I close Disk Utility and re-open it, the graph then only shows the 120.88GB macOS (in blue).
Install macOS Sierra
Back at the “macOS Utilities” window, do the following to begin the macOS Sierra installation process:
- Click on the “Install macOS” option and click the “Continue” button.
- The “macOS Sierra” installer’s splash screen will appear. Click the “Continue” button.
- Click on the “Agree” button to agree to the license. A popup confirmation window will appear; click on the popup’s “Agree” button.
- Select the hard drive and click the “Install” button.
Note: You may encounter strange hardware behavior. On my 13 inch Macbook Pro Retina, the macOS Sierra installer turned the fan on to maximum for the whole duration of the installation. Thankfully, once it finished and rebooted, the fan turned off and stayed off.
The macOS Sierra installer tries to be helpful by telling you how long it will take. Unfortunately, it lies. You should take whatever remaining time it tells you and multiple by 10 (for minutes) or 100 (for seconds). If it says “6 minutes remaining”, that could mean 60 minutes or one hour remaining. Worse, if it says “6 seconds remaining”, you may be staring at that message for 600 seconds or one hour.
The best solution is to be patient. Go grab a bite to eat and watch a movie. Take a long nap or better yet, sleep your 8 hours. I would wait at least 4 hours before giving up.
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Note: You can display the installer’s log window (using the menu or pressing Cmd+L). I didn’t find this helpful at all. Even for a successful install, numerous errors are logged; I don’t know what is a critical or non-critical error. And often, you won’t see a progress/status log output for a long time, easily 20-30 minutes. Not seeing any new log statements does not mean that the installer froze. So the logs didn’t do anything for me.
What Does Giving Up Mean?
Giving up means you have accepted defeat. The next step is to retreat and try again. Some suggestions on how to proceed:
- Reset your Mac by doing the following:
- Reset the SMC (see step 3 under the “Reset the SMC on Mac notebook computers” section).
- Reset the NVRAM (aka PRAM).
- Run the Apple Hardware Diagnostic or Test to make sure you don’t have a hardware failure.
- Finally, retry the macOS Sierra install.
- Use a different USB port on the Mac.
- Use another brand of USB flash drive.
- Delete and re-download the macOS Sierra installer (especially if you downloaded it a long while ago). Even if the checksum is okay, you may want to re-download in case there is a newer version of the installer with a bug fix for your very problem.
- Download an older Mac OS X version, say Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, install that, and then upgrade to macOS Sierra. If you know the Mac OS X version which came with your Mac originally, consider downloading (if you still have access) and installing that version first.
- Use the Mac Recovery System to download and install the original OS version that came with your Mac. Then upgrade from that to macOS Sierra.
- Buy a more recent model Mac (at most a couple of years old). It may be that your current Mac is too old or slow to support macOS Sierra. It’s okay to keep running an old Mac OS version. (For example, if I had a Core 2 Duo Mac, I would not run anything later than Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks on it.)
Hopefully, this post will help you to do a fresh installation of macOS Sierra.
Some info above taken from:
Ever since the release of Mac OS Lion the software upgrades for Macintosh computers are distributed through the online app store. Be it a clean install or upgrade, mac app store require you connect to the internet to download whole installation files. The online OS update is okay if you have stable broadband connectivity and enough bandwidth. Apple also provides an option for internet recovery of macOS if your computer fails to boot. But there are situations where you can’t download the OS from the Apple servers. Having a bootable macOS offline installation disk is the only solution in such scenarios.
How to make a macOS bootable USB installer
It is possible to create a backup macOS installer on a DVD or USB drive but later is the best choice. Most of the Macs these days don’t have DVD slots, and the installation through a disc is very slow. Hence we discuss only about making macOS recovery installer on a USB disc. For this you need a Mac and a USB pen drive of at least 8 GB space, and a third-party app called DiskMaker.
- First, download a copy of Disk Maker from the official website.
- Choose a version as per your requirement. For example, if you want make USB installer for macOS Catalina 10.15, download Disk Maker X 9.
- I use an MacBook Pro with High Sierra. Hence, I’m downloading disk maker X 7.
- The next step is to download full macOS installer from the App Store to your Applications folder.
- Run Disk Maker DMG installer and copy the app to the Applications.
- The application will automatically detect the downloaded macOS as shown in the screenshot. Select “Use this Copy” if you would like to proceed with it.
- Next is setting the USB pen drive for creating the bootable installer. Choose the third option ” An 8 GB USB Thumb drive.”
- The app will list all drives in your system. Pick the one you would like use as macOS USB installer.
- Ignore the warning message and proceed to Erase and Create macOS USB disk. Don’t forget to provide your admin password when it prompts.
- Keep checking notifications tab for progress. When it completes you will find Install macOS Mojave (or High Sierra) mounted to your desktop as a USB disk.
- That’s your backup. Unmount and keep the USB installer to a safe place.
What is the alternative if I don’t have usable Mac at the moment?
This method is applicable when you have a Mac, and the internet recovery fails. But think about a situation when your only Mac stops to boot, and you don’t have USB installer or TimeMachine backup! Downloading Mac OS DMG file might save you. If you have a macOS DMG, you can create bootable USB disk from a Windows PC — use a software like TransMac for this purpose.
Clean installing or restoring a Mac offline with USB pen drive
As said earlier, you could use the macOS USB installer to do a clean install or restore it upon a boot failure. Just connect the USB disk and press the Option/Alt Key when you hear the boot sound. The Mac will then display all the startup disks available.
Pick the USB drive with the label “Install macOS Mojave or High Sierra” and follow on-screen instructions to complete the installation. If you need, use the Disk Utility to format the drive for doing a clean install.