A bootable installer is one of the fastest ways to install El Capitan. Rather than copy the installer to a local drive you can run it right off a USB disk (or Thunderbolt if you dare). Such a little USB drive would be similar to the sticks that came with the older MacBook Air, when we were all still sitting around wondering how you would ever install the OS on a computer with no optical media or Ethernet otherwise. Luckily, Apple loves us. To make a bootable USB/flash drive of El Capitan like the one that used to come with the MacBook Air, first name the USB drive. I’ll use mavinstall for the purposes of this article. The format should be Mac OS Extended Journaled. The installer is called Install OS X El Capitan and is by default located in the /Applications directory. Inside the app bundle, there’s a new binary called createinstallmedia (nested in Contents/Resources). Using this binary you can create an installation drive (similar to what we used to do with InstallESD). To do so, specify the –volume to create the drive on (note that the target volume will be erased), the path of the Install OS X El Capitan app bundle and then we’re going to select –nointeraction so it just runs through the whole thing
- Mac Os El Capitan Install
- Create El Capitan Installer Disk
- Download El Capitan Installer App
- Create Bootable El Capitan Installer
I have downloaded the El Capitan dmg file (InstallMacOSX.dmg) provided by Apple. The expanded dmg image contains the package 'InstallMacOSX.pkg' which should be run to create the El Capitan install.
- Step 1: Obtain the El Capitan file from Apple as mentioned above. Step 2: Run and mount the InstallMacOSX.DMG file. This will open a screen with InstallMacOSX.pkg. Step 3: Open and run InstallMacOSX.pkg. Step 4: Install the file to the drive that is currently being used to create the recovery drive.
- With the release of El Capitan, the script to create a Bootable ISO for VMware of Mavericks and Yosemite does not seem to work anymore on the El Capitan official release. The ISO simply does not.
/Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/mavinstall --applicationpath /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app --nointeraction
Note: You’ll need to elevate your privileges for this to run.
Mac Os El Capitan Install
Once run you’ll see that it erases the disk, copies the Installation materials (InstallESX, etc) and then makes the drive bootable, as follows:Create El Capitan Installer Disk
Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 100%... Copying installer files to disk... Copy complete. Making disk bootable... Copying boot files... Copy complete.