You’ll probably notice that booting from a USB flash drive is a lot slower than from a SATA hard drive, let alone an SSD. You always want an up-to-date emergency drive for both security and support for the newest Mac models. After that, reboot from the flash drive and check the Mac App Store for updates. You’ll be walked through setting everything up. When you run the installer, be sure to select your Mac-formatted flash drive. Once that’s done, it’s time to go the the Mac App Store and download that free Mavericks installer. See The Truth About USB Flash Drives for step-by-step instructions to reformat a standard thumb drive for use as a Mac boot drive. If you don’t do this, the OS X installer will not let you install OS X to the drive.
You’ll need at least a 16 GB flash drive to install and run Mavericks.īefore you can install OS X, you need to reformat the drive to use Apple’s GUID format. Still, better safe than sorry, so be sure you buy a thumb drive compatible with OS X. Some are even marked “Windows only”, although I’m not sure why they couldn’t be used with Macs or Linux. Preparing the Flash DriveĮvery flash drive I’ve ever run across is preformatted for use with Windows. I chose to use OS X Mavericks because it’s free and it runs on all Macs that can run OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. In fact, if you have 8 GB or more, you might even need to move to a 32 GB flash drive. If you have 4 GB of RAM, that ties up 4 GB on your boot drive. Why? Because OS X uses virtual memory, which uses some drive space, and when MacBooks and the Mac mini go to sleep, they default to writing the contents of system memory to disk. flash drive), and while you can probably squeeze Mavericks onto an 8 GB drive, you’ll probably want to go with 16 GB. Today’s alternative is the USB thumb drive (a.k.a.
#MAVERICKS USB INSTALL MAC OS#
The Mac OS is big and needs a fair bit of elbow room. Those days are long past: Since Mac OS 7.6, floppy installation was history, and OS X quickly outgrew a single CD and later a single DVD. Once upon a time you could boot a Mac from a floppy disk with Disk Tools or some other utility on it, run diagnostics, and get back to work.
#MAVERICKS USB INSTALL HOW TO#
This article explains how to build a bootable thumb drive with OS X 10.9 Mavericks and some utilities. It’s very helpful to have an emergency drive you can boot from to run diagnostics on your primary drive, whether that’s a DVD, hard drive, or USB thumb drive. One problem with personal computers is that you can’t run full diagnostics of your boot drive when booted from it.