Catalina Bootable Usb Download

MacOS Catalina's name was inspired by Santa Catalina Island, popularly known as Catalina and one. How to create a bootable macOS Big Sur USB install drive Step 1: Download macOS Big Sur. After Big Sur launches later this year, you’ll be able to download it directly from the Mac App Store. In this video I show you how to make a bootable Vanilla Mac OS Catalina USB Installer easily using Install Disk Creator.You can use this to install Mac OS Ca. Select the “Install macOS Catalina” (with left/right arrow keys) and hit the “return/enter” key to boot from the USB flash drive. It may take 5-10 minutes to load the installer from the USB flash drive. Sometimes the progress bar may appear to be frozen or the screen will go black for a minute or two.

Plug the bootable installer into a Mac that is connected to the internet and compatible with the version of macOS you're installing. Turn on your Mac and continue to hold the power button until you see the startup options window, which shows your bootable volumes. Select the volume containing the bootable installer, then click Continue. You can use a USB drive (external hard drive or flash drive) as a startup disk from which to install the Ma.

Apple has just released the latest update to macOS. The update, named macOS Catalina, brings a bucket-full of new features including the ability of using iPad as an external screen for Mac. It also officially kills the 20-year-old iTunes (on Mac) and brings separate apps to manage music and podcasts while also adding a new TV app.

Other notable changes include the abandonment of 32-bit apps in favour of 64-bit apps, refreshed Reminders, Photos, Mail, Safari, and Notes apps, and the introduction of Apple Arcade among others.

Whether you should upgrade your Macs to the new macOS Catalina is entirely up to your current workflow. The change that could affect it the most is the support for 32-bit apps being officially dropped. If you rely on old apps that needs an update for the new platform, you might want to hold your upgrade until these apps are updated or you find alternatives.

With macOS Catalina, Apple has changed the way you used to download the installer. Previously, you would download the new OS installer from AppStore itself and then use that installer to make a bootable installer for later use. In Catalina, when you click the Get button in AppStore, you are taken to the Software Update screen to download the new update.

This change makes is a bit tricky to create a bootable install media like a USB stick or memory card. Albeit not as straightforward as before, but it is definitely possible to make a bootable installer for macOS Catalina. This tutorial shows how to do that.

Update – 12th November, 2020: The latest update to macOS is out now. Learn how to make a bootable macOS Big Sur installer.

Make a Bootable macOS USB Stick or Memory Card

Before you begin:

  • Make sure you have a USB stick aka pen drive aka flash drive or memory card aka SD card with at least 16GB of storage.
  • Take complete backup of data on your Mac.
  • Make sure you have a working, strong, and stable Wi-Fi connection to download macOS Catalina.

Step 1

Due to the way you get your copy of macOS Catalina has changed a bit, we will rely on a third-party app which will help us get the installer. The app we will use for this is called macOS Catalina Patcher which is primarily used to make a patched installer for old Macs that don’t support new versions of macOS.

Download macOS Catalina Patcher, place it under Applications, launch it, and click Continue. Click Download a Copy.

Now, before you move to the next screen, click Options in the menu bar and disable ‘Auto-apply Post Install Patches.’ After that, click Start Download and wait for the download — that is around 8GB — to finish.

Update: I just read other tutorials mentioning that you don’t need macOS Catalina Patcher. You can download macOS Catalina installer from the Software Update screen and it’s placed under Applications. If you wish to go ahead with that method, you can change the path in the Step 3 from Downloads to Applications.

Step 2

Once the download is finished, you can see ‘macOS Catalina Installer” under Downloads folder. Now it’s time to erase your USB stick or memory card.

Insert the medium you wish to use for creating a bootable installer in your Mac and open Disk Utility. Select the medium from the list on left and click Erase. Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) under Format. Type Untitled in Name field (you can choose any name here).

Click Erase and wait for the process to finish. Remember that you are completely erasing the data on this media.

Step 3

Now you are ready to move to the final step which is to create the bootable macOS Catalina media.

Open Terminal and type the following command. Make sure you don’t leave any spaces in-between.

sudo /Downloads/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled

Catalina Bootable Usb Download Tool

Note: Replace Untitled (in bold above) with whichever name you gave in step 2.

If copying and pasting or typing this command doesn’t work, you can do the following.

Type sudo in Terminal and keep the window open. Now open Downloads folder and drag the macOS Catalina Installer file on the Terminal window. It will automatically generate the path where your Catalina installer is located.

Now, append --volume /Volumes/Untitled at the end of the automatically generated string and press Return key on keyboard. Note that there are two dashes (--) before volume and a space after volume.

Enter your password, press Y and press enter to start the process and let it finish — which will take about 15 minutes.

How to Install macOS Catalina from a Bootable Volume?

Once Terminal finishes the process, you can restart your Mac and when it is booting up, press and hold Option key until you see a black screen with an option to select the startup disk.

Select Install macOS Catalina and click continue. Let the installer load and once it’s finished, you should enter macOS Recovery screen which will ask you to select a user account which you know the password of. Choose your administrator account and enter its password.

Now click Disk Utility and continue. Select the volume where your current macOS is installed. The volume is usually named macOS. Click Erase. Leave the options as default and click Erase again.

After the process finishes, close Disk Utility and you will return to the recovery screen. This time, select Install macOS and continue.

Let the install process finish, which consists of a couple of automatic reboots. Once finished, you should see the initial macOS setup screen. After you are done with this on-boarding step, you will see the desktop and are all set to start using macOS Catalina on your Mac.

Making a Bootable macOS Installer Media: Summing Up

Bootable macOS installer is useful if you want to completely erase your Mac and reinstall the operating system, or if you have more than one Macs and you don’t want to spend time (and bandwidth) downloading the macOS update.

Making a bootable macOS Catalina installer isn’t too complicated. You can make a bootable flash drive aka pen drive aka USB stick or memory card and use it to install the latest macOS version on your Mac.

That’s it, folks. This was a quick tutorial on how to create a bootable macOS Catalina installer on a flash drive or memory card. I hope you found it useful.

Bootable

I purchased a used 2018 Mac mini desktop and wanted to put a fresh installation of the latest macOS 10.15 Catalina on it. Below are the steps I took.

Note: The instructions below are the same for macOS 10.13 High Sierra and macOS 10.14 Mojave.

Download macOS Catalina

You will need a Mac to download macOS Catalina; you can download Catalina from The Mac Go. (The Mac mini came with macOS 10.14 Mojave so I used it to download Catalina.)

Go to the Mac App Store, search for “macOS Catalina”, and download it. It will be saved to the “/Applications/Install macOS Catalina” location. If the installer automatically launches, just close it.

Note: If you plan to run the installer first to update your current macOS version to Catalina, you will want to move the “Install macOS Catalina” application out of the “/Applications” directory; otherwise, the installer will delete itself from the “/Applications” directory when the upgrade completes. For example, you can move the “Install macOS Catalina” application to the “~/Downloads” directory and run it from there.

Format USB Flash Drive

Because macOS Catalina is 8.4GB in size, you will need a 16GB USB flash drive. You don’t need to delete the existing content on the drive because we will blow it all away in a subsequent step.

If the USB flash drive is not already formatted as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”, format it like so:

  1. Plug the USB flash drive into your Mac.
  2. Launch the “Disk Utility” application.
  3. On the left-hand pane, select the USB drive (not the partition under it, if any).
  4. Click on the “Erase” tab (or button at the top).
    1. Input a name like “Catalina” (this name will be overwritten later).
    2. Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” for “Format”.
    3. If available, select “Master Boot Record” for “Scheme”.
    4. Click the “Erase” button at the bottom. Click the “Erase” button in the warning popup dialog if you get one.
  5. The format operation may take several minutes to complete. (USB 2.0 and large capacity drives may take longer.) After the format completes, the partition will be mounted under “/Volumes/Catalina” (or whatever name you selected above).
  6. Close the “Disk Utility” application.

Write macOS Catalina to USB Flash Drive

To create a bootable USB macOS Catalina installer, run the “Terminal” application and this command:

# The --volume value is the mounted USB flash drive partition; in this case, named /Volumes/Catalina
sudo/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume/Volumes/Catalina
# You will be prompted for your user's administrative password.

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. Use a more recent macOS version (at least Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan) or manually create the USB installation drive 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 Catalina”, and copy the installation files to that partition. The output will look like:

Erasing disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 30%... 100%
Copying to disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 30%... 40%... 50%... 60%... 70%... 80%... 90%... 100%
Making disk bootable...
Copying boot files...
Install media now available at '/Volumes/Install macOS Catalina'

The above process took 20-30 minutes using my Kingston USB 2.0 flash drive.

Catalina Dmg Bootable Usb Download

Boot From USB Flash Drive

Note: Apple’s How to create a bootable installer for macOS page suggest using the “Startup Disk” configuration (under “System Preferences”) to select the USB flash drive as the startup drive. Then on restart, the Mac should boot from the USB flash drive. Unfortunately, the “Startup Disk” did not list my USB flash drive as a startup option, so I was not able to use this method.

To boot a Mac with the USB flash drive:

  1. Insert the USB flash drive.
  2. While holding the “option” key down, turn on the Mac to display the Startup Manager.
  3. You should see one or more icons, one of which should be called “Install macOS Catalina” 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 Catalina”, 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.
  4. Select the “Install macOS Catalina” (with left/right arrow keys) and hit the “return/enter” key to boot from the USB flash drive.

It may take 5-10 minutes to load the installer from the USB flash drive. Sometimes the progress bar may appear to be frozen or the screen will go black for a minute or two. Be patient.

External Startup Disk Not Allowed

On a newer Mac with the T2 security chip, booting from an external drive may be disallowed by default. Attempting to boot from a USB flash drive will result in a “Security settings do not allow this Mac to use an external startup disk” warning message.

To allow booting from the USB flash drive, do the following:

  1. Hold down “Command-R” (hold down both the “Command ⌘” and “R” keys) when you start the Mac to launch macOS Recovery. You can release the keys when you see the Apple logo.
    • Tip: An easier alternative is to hold the “Option/Alt” key on boot to launch the Startup Manager. Then just click and release “Command-R” keys to launch macOS Recovery.
  2. The macOS Recovery screen contains a top-level “macOS Utilities” menu.
  3. Click on the “Utilities” menu and select “Startup Security Utility”. Input your administrator password when prompted.
  4. In the Startup Security Utility, under “Allowed Boot Media”, select the “Allow booting from external or removable media” option.
  5. If the Mac won’t have access to the Internet (either by wire or wirelessly) when installing macOS Catalina, make sure to select either the “Medium Security” or “No Security” option under the “Secure Boot” section. (You can change the option back to the default “Full Security” afterwards.)
  6. Quit the macOS Utilities to restart the Mac.
  7. On restart, follow the directions in the previous section to boot from the USB flash drive.

Erase the Internal Hard Drive

When the installer finishes loading, you will see a “macOS Utilities” screen appear. It looks the same as the “macOS Recovery” screen with one difference. In the “macOS Utilities” window, the second option will say “Install macOS” instead of “Reinstall macOS”. In “macOS Recovery”, the “Reinstall macOS” option would just re-install the same version of macOS. The “Install macoS” option will install the macOS Catalina version on the USB flash drive.

Before installing macOS, I wanted a clean slate so I erased the internal hard drive like so:

  1. Select the “Disk Utility” option and click the “Continue” button on the bottom to launch the “Disk Utility” application.
  2. On the left-hand pane, select the internal hard drive (not the partition under it, if any).
  3. Click on the “Erase” button at the top.
    1. Keep the default “Macintosh HD” name or input a new one.
    2. Select “APFS” for “Format”.
    3. Click the “Erase” button at the bottom. The SSD (Solid State Drive) format took less than a minute to complete.
  4. Close the “Disk Utility” application.

Install macOS Catalina

Warning: If your Mac has a T2 security chip and you left the “Full Security” option configured in the Startup Security Utility, make sure that Internet access (wired or wireless) is available before starting the macOS Catalina installation. You can configure the wireless network by clicking on the wireless icon at the top-right corner of the macOS Utilities screen.

Back at the “macOS Utilities” window, do the following to start the macOS Catalina installation:

  1. Click on the “Install macOS” option and click the “Continue” button.
  2. The “macOS Catalina” installer’s splash screen will appear. Click the “Continue” button.
  3. Click on the “Agree” button to agree to the license. A popup confirmation window will appear; click on the popup’s “Agree” button.
  4. Select the internal hard drive and click the “Install” button.

My Mac mini took 20-30 minutes to complete the macOS Catalina installation. I think there were a couple of reboots in-between. And a few times, the screen would go black for a minute or two. Be patient and give the process an hour or more to complete.

If you run into problems installing macOS Catalina, check the “What Does Giving Up Mean?” section (at the bottom) of Install macOS Sierra Using Bootable USB Flash Drive for possible solutions.

Note: macOS Catalina seems to have an issue with my Dell 24in U2410 monitor. During the initial bootup screen, the monitor shows a blank screen with a message, “The current input timing is not supported by the monitor display”. Thankfully, the monitor works correctly after the bootup completes. And later, this warning message no longer appeared on bootup.

Enjoy your fresh installation of macOS 10.15 Catalina.