(The Terminal commands I provide here assume that the drive is named Untitled.

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

That approach made sense in the past, but a number of the reasons for it no longer apply, so this year I’m limiting the instructions to a single method: using OS X’s own createinstallmedia tool. In my articles on creating a bootable installer drive for older versions of OS X, I provided three, or even four, different ways to perform the procedure, depending on which version of OS X you were running, your comfort level with Terminal, and other factors. 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. 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.

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.

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