Cannot boot to Mojave bootable USB installer
I am trying to make a bootable USB drive installer for Mojave. I formatted the 16 GB drive using Mac Extended (Journaled) with a GUID partition. I created the drive in two ways, using the terminal commands given here, as well as by using the "Install Disk Creator" software package.
In either case, the drive does not show up when I restart and hold down the Option key, nor does it show up in System Preferences/Startup Disk.
After creating the bootable drive, the only file on the drive is "Install macOS Mojave." This file appears to be identical (exact same # of bytes) as the "Install macOS Mojave" app that I downloaded from Apple into my Applications folder, in other words, the process appears to have simply copied the installer. I would have thought that the process of creating a bootable drive would add a set of system and user folders to the drive as well.
In addition, I also used the same steps to try to create a bootable installation drive using a 500 GB hard drive, but it doesn't appear upon option/startup either.
Any further ideas?
MacBook