
To see if your Mac uses Apple silicon, select About This Mac from the Apple () menu. Terminal at the successful conclusion of the createinstallmedia commandĭo you have a Mac with Apple silicon? If so, there’s a slightly different process. Terminal displays the progress of the erasure.


You’ll be prompted to type your administrator password and press Return again.Once the command has been entered, press Return.NOTE (*): If your Mac is using macOS Sierra or earlier, include the “–applicationpath” argument and installer path, as shown in the command for El Capitan. For my example, I replaced it with Installer.īig Sur:* sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Big\ Sur.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume /Volumes/MyVolume Catalina:* sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume /Volumes/MyVolume Mojave:* sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume /Volumes/MyVolume High Sierra:* sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume /Volumes/MyVolume El Capitan: sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia -volume /Volumes/MyVolume -applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app In each command, replace the name MyVolume with the name of your volume. These commands are dependent on the installer being in your Applications folder. At the Terminal prompt, type or copy and paste (easier and more accurate) one of the following commands.Find the Terminal app in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder.For this article, I used a 2TB USB hard disk drive erased and formatted as Mac OS Extended and given the name Installer. Plug in the USB flash drive or formatted volume you’re using for the bootable install disk.When the file is downloaded, double-click it to install an app named “Install OS X El Capitan” into your Applications folder. The installer has the name “Install macOS ”.įor Mac OS X El Capitan, the link downloads a disk image file named InstallMacOSX.dmg.

For macOS Big Sur, macOS Catalina, macOS Mojave or macOS High Sierra, the links download an installer directly into your app folder.

To ensure that you’re getting a valid, un-hacked, and legal version of macOS, you need to download it directly from Apple. The macOS Big Sur download page in the Mac App Store
