Mac Catalina Bootable Usb

 

  • Create Bootable Usb On Macos Catalina; If you want to use your USB stick with an Apple Mac, you will need to restart or power-on the Mac with the USB stick inserted while the Option/alt (⌥) key is pressed. This will launch Apple’s ‘Startup Manager’ which shows bootable devices connected to the machine. Your USB stick should appear as.
  • In today’s guide, we will be helping the mac users to create a bootable macOS Catalina USB drive, which they can install on their Mac devices. MacOS Catalina 10.15.6 beta 3 is the sixteenth and the latest OS released by Apple in June 2020.
  • Now that we’re done partitioning our USB, let us proceed to set it as bootable. Create a bootable installer Download Mojave and Catali na — after downloading both, you should have Install macOs Catalina and Install macOs Mojave inside your /Applications folder.

Create a macOS Catalina bootable USB drive using this handy guide. The USB drive can be used to upgrade a Mac, clean install macOS or for recovery purposes. One supports Catalina (A1398) - but the drive died and I have replaced with a new, empty drive. The OTHER one does NOT support Catalina, it's too old (A1278), it's running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6. How ON EARTH can I use my functional (but outdated and unsupported) Mac to download and create a bootable USB for Catalina to rebuild my supported MBP?

Mac

After months of beta testing, Apple has rolled out macOS 10.15 Catalina to public users. You can download and install macOS Catalina if you have a compatible Mac. The macOS Catalina brings tons of new features such as the Apple Arcade, Screen Time, Voice Control, Sidecar, and Find My app. It has also replaced iTunes with three independent apps – Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple TV.

Is your Mac compatible with macOS Catalina?

Here’s the list of Mac devices compatible with the new software update:

  • MacBook (Early 2015 or later)
  • MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or later)
  • MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or later)
  • Mac mini (Late 2012 or later)
  • iMac (Late 2012 or later)
  • iMac Pro (2017)
  • Mac Pro (Late 2013 or later)

How to clean install the new software update

Upgrading to macOS 10.15 Catalina is pretty simple. Tap on the Apple icon in the top-left corner of the screen, then go to System Preferences > Software Update to download it. Alternatively, you can download it directly from the Mac App Store.

But sometimes upgrading macOS from the previous version to the latest one is not the best way. You might want to clean install macOS Catalina to give your Mac a fresh start without any issues from the previous installation. Here’s how to clean install macOS Catalina from USB drive:

Steps to install

  • Take a full backup of all your important data. Save it to the cloud or an external drive
  • You have to create a bootable USB drive. Here’s how you can create it. Make sure the USB drive is at least 8GB in size, and nothing else is stored on it
  • Download the macOS Catalina installation file using this link
  • Turn off the Mac and then insert the bootable USB drive
  • Now turn the Mac back on while holding the Option key
  • It will take you to the boot menu where you can select the USB drive. If your Mac has the T2 security chip, you have to first enable booting via external drives from macOS Recovery
  • After a while, you’ll see the macOS Utilities menu on the screen. Select Disk Utility and then Continue
  • Check to make sure you’ve selected the main drive of your Mac. Also ensure that the format is set as APFS or Mac OS Extended
  • Now click Erase to wipe out the drive
  • Once the drive has been erased, select Install macOS and then Continue. Just follow the on-screen prompts to clean install macOS Catalina
Mac Catalina Bootable Usb

Once you’ve successfully installed the new software, you can transfer all your data back from the cloud or external storage drive to the Mac. Also, head over to the Mac App Store and re-install all the apps you want.

Create Mac Os Catalina Bootable Usb

In previous tutorial, we wrote a post about creating macOS Catalina bootable USB on Mac, which is a simple tool and there are a couple of free tools to complete the task. You can even use the built-in tool Disk Utility and dd command to do it without installing any third-party apps. However, the situation is much different on Windows 10 because macOS install file (end with .dmg) is not supported by Windows OS. Unlike ISO image, there are few tools on Windows that can handle .dmg files. That's the most challenging part!

So in this article, we will show you how to create macOS bootable USB on Windows 10 and targets macOS Catalina specifically, which is the latest version of Apple macOS and it is easy to download the install file. This will be a great help if there were something wrong with your Mac and a fresh install was demanded. Also if you were a Mac enthusiast and can not afford the price, then it is not a bad choice to build a hackintosh with Catalina.

Before heading to the details of each method, please make sure you have downloaded a copy of Catalina OS dmg file and a working USB drive with more than 12GB storage.

Method 1: Create macOS Catalina Bootable USB on Windows 10 via DMG Editor

There are more than one solutions to create macOS Catalina Bootable USB on Windows 10 and we will go with easy one first. DMG Editor, a popular app developed by UUByte, is a multi-functional and cross-platform image burning tool that works on Windows, Linux and macOS. It supports creating bootable USB from popular image files, including dmg, iso, zip, img. And it has full support for Linux distros and old versions of Windows OS. macOS support was not available in previous versions. But now, the latest version of DMG Editor adds better support for macOS dmg file. Let's get a try first.

Step 1.Go to UUByte official website and download Windows version of Etcher from there.

Step 2. Run the executable file and complete the installation process. After that, insert an USB drive in Windows 10.

Step 3. Open the installed UUByte DMG Editor by double-clicking on the icon shown on your home screen. Click on the 'Burn' option then. After that, add Catalina .dmg file to the software and click on 'Change' button to choose the inserted USB device.

Step 4. Finally, click on the 'Burn' button to start the dmg burning process. At this time, a progress bar is displayed on the screen and it gives you an estimated calculation for the time remaining.

Step 5. Wait about 10 minutes. It will show you a pop-up message after completing the task successfully.

The process is very quick and easy to execute. But you might have issues running Etcher app on old computers with low profile hardware. Etcher GUI is built primarily on a new Javascript framework called Electron , which consumes a lot of computing resources. So if you were going to use Etcher to create macOS Catalina bootable USB, make sure testing it on a high-profile Windows 10 PC or laptop.

Method 2: Convert .dmg to .iso and Create macOS Catalina Bootable USB

macOS Catalina install image is distributed in .dmg format and Windows 10 has no support. Hen it is almost impossible to read such files in conventional ways. So in this part, we will convert macOS Catalina dmg file into ISO and create a bootable installer by burning the ISO file to USB. This can be done with the help of third-party software.

Usb Bootable Mac Os Catalina

To execute the method, you need two software. First, you need a special software to convert dmg to ISO. Second, an ISO to USB burning software to make bootable USB from ISO file. To demonstrate, we have used 7 PowerISO & UUByte ISO Editor to create macOS Catalina bootable USB from Windows 10.

Step 1: Download and install PowerISO on Windows 10.

Step 2: Insert your USB drive. Right-click on this peripheral device and choose the option to format it. After a few seconds, you will get the notification of completing the format process.

Step 3: Now, open PowerISO and navigate to Tool menu. From the pop-up list, please click the 'Convert' option.

Step 4: In a pop-up window, click the folder icon to add macOS Catalina dmg file in Source file field. And set an output file name under Destination file section. Next. choose Standard ISO Images (.ISO) from Output image file format.

Step 5: When the ISO file is created successfully. Download and install UUByte ISO Editor. Then click Burn button to open ISO burning Window. Next, add ISO file to the program and select the USB name. Wait for 7 minutes, and a bootable USB is ready!

Step 6: After getting a task completion message on screen, eject the USB and then start installing macOS Catalina from the USB drive.

The solution is simple but may need to purchase a couple of tools for executing the steps. But if you will search smartly on the internet, chances are there that you can get the required tools without paying any cost. However, if you want to bypass using any of the third-party tools, you can create the Catalina OS bootable USB by accessing macOS in a virtual machine.

Bootable

Method 3: Use TransMac to Create macOS Catalina Bootable USB in Windows 10

TransMac is a single-purpose utility to open Mac disk image from a Windows PC. It's one of the quickest methods to create macOS bootable USB drive from dmg file. However, the support for Catalina is not good as Mojave and High Serrira. Plus, you have to pay for 59 USD to use the burn feature. That's why we mention this app at the end of this post.

Step 1: Download TransMac from the official site and run the .exe file to complete the installation process.

Step 2: Now plug in a USB device into the port. Now right-click on TransMac icon shown on the home screen and then choose to Run as administrator.

Step 3: After landing inside the tool's window, all disk drives will be displayed on the left side automatically. Click File -> Open Disk Image to load macOS Catalina dmf file into the program.

Step 4: Before proceeding further, you need to format your USB device to make it compatible with Mac HFS or APS partition. For doing the same, click on the 'Format Diks for Mac' option. Wait for 30 seconds to complete the process.

Step 5: Right-click on the selected USB disk. From the shown list, click on 'Restore with Disk Image'. If it shows any warning message, just click on the OK button to accept.

Create Bootable Usb Mac Catalina

Step 6: After that, select the location of saved Mac OS Catalina DMG file and then click on the OK button. Now stay back and look after 20 minutes. You will get ready with a bootable Catalina USB.

TransMac is one of the easiest method to create a bootable macOS Installer USB on a Windows PC. You can use this application to burn any version of macOS operating system file to USB.

Conclusion

Mac Catalina Usb Boot Disk

To conclude, we would recommend going with either the first or the second method to create bootable macOS Catalina USB. Both are super easy to follow because you don't need to install multiple tools and go through a multi-layer process to meet your requirement.