OS X Yosemite Part 3: Creating a USB Installer

07/11/14 08:37 Filed in: Technology

There are times when you need to do a clean install on your Mac or multiple Macs. The usually way of doing this would be to boot into the recovery partition, use Disk Utility to wipe your drive, and then install a fresh copy of OS X Yosemite.

While this process is convenient it can take some time as you still have to download the installer package as a part of the installation process. Depending on your bandwidth and how many machines you need to do a clean install of, it could add to the time it takes to get the job done.

With a bootable USB installer, you can download OS X once, create the installer and then use that USB drive to boot each of your machines into the OS X installer. OS X is only downloaded once to create the installer and you can take that USB drive with you from machine to machine. It really can make the installation process fast and convenient.

In this screencast, I cover two ways to create a USB Installer, one using Diskmaker X and the other using the terminal process for ‘createinstallmedia.’ Both of these options create a bootable installer that you can use to do a clean install of OS X. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below or on my Youtube Channel.

Tags: Tutorials, Apple, Mac OSX