Note: The entire process will take around 5 minutes, depending on the capacity of your thumb drive. Give it a name, or just use “ Untitled“, make sure the format is Mac OS External (Journaled), then click the “ Erase” button below.Click once to select your thumb drive, then click the “ Erase” icon on the top.Look for the name of your thumb drive under the “ External” section on the sidebar of Disk Utility App.Launch Spotlight ( Command + Space), type in “ Disk Utility” and hit Return to launch the app.Plug the thumb drive into the USB port of your computer.If you are using an existing thumb drive, make sure to backup all existing data inside as we are going to format the thumb drive, getting it ready and compatible for the bootable mac installer. While waiting for the download, let’s move on to the next step – formatting your thumb drive. Note: Download will take around 10 minutes to a few hours, depending on your internet connection. Next, click Get > Download to initiate downloading. Note: Clicking on any of the above links will launch the App Store, which brings you to the official download page of the specific macOS. OS X El Capitan – Click this link, scroll down to to step 4 and click “Download OS X El Capitan”.Let’s start with this first as the downloading of the macOS installer file may take a while.Ĭlick on the following links to choose which macOS’s installer file you would like to download: Whether you want to reinstall the latest macOS Catalina, or you want to revert or downgrade to Mojave, or High Sierra, you will need to decide now as it dictates which installer file you will be downloading in a second. I would suggest you to get the one with a capacity of 16 GB or higher to store the macOS installer file.

A thumb driveĪ thumb drive, aka USB flash drive, is what you would need for this to work.

Make sure you’ve got all of them as it will make the entire process much faster. Prerequisitesīefore we get started, here are some prerequisites that you need to take into consideration. You can do it anytime you want – As long as you keep the USB drive bootable with the macOS installer in it, you can reformat and reinstall the macOS again anytime you want. You can do it faster – All it takes to reinstall macOS on a computer is to simply plug in the USB drive and get the mac to boot via external source (your thumb drive). You can do it offline – Installing macOS via USB will allow you to do it offline meaning that you wouldn’t need to wait for the re-downloading of the entire macOS installer, which could take a while depending on your internet speed. Well, if you do want to install macOS on your computer, I would suggest you to do it via USB. As a mac user, there may come a time when you’d want to reinstall macOS on your computer- say something goes wrong with your machine or you just want to have a fresh start.

Create bootable usb stick on mac