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Im creating a bootable USB following directions from https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372.
In Terminal, I receive message "no valid soduers found, quitting."
and when running installer app message "This disk doesn't use the GUID Partition Table scheme." Thumb drive is freshly formatted with OS/Journalling option selected.
How do I get past either of these to obtain a bootable thumb drive?
a brody: Could you help me a bit more? In Disk Utility /Erase I'm given only four options; I've tried the first two with similar results. I'm using a Mojave iMac to install Catalina as a bootable thumb drive.
How do I force the drive to be apfs formatted?
Am I going about this all wrong?
Thanks!
Just erase the USB stick as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled).
You have two other issues, possibly three.
One is the path to the volume for the USB stick is listed incorrectly. You used a space in the USB stick's volume name which complicates things so rename it without the space. Otherwise you need to use a backslash "\" to escape the space or you need to enclose the path to the USB stick in double quotes. Plus you have the USB stick shown as being mounted on the root of the system which is not the macOS default which is to mount volumes at "/Volumes". Here is what the path to the USB stick should be if you let macOS mount the USB stick with system defaults:
--volume /Volumes/USB\ Disk
--volume "/Volumes/USB Disk"
The other issue is you have multiple errors regarding the "sudoers" file. When modifying the "sudoers" file you should only use the following command to edit the file as it will make sure to check the file for proper syntax and layout:
sudo EDITOR=nano visudo
An even better option than editing the "sudoers" file is to put any customizations into a separate file so that you never actually touch the original "sudoers" file making it a bit less likely you will break your system. I haven't tested that the following command includes the proper path for Catalina or Big Sur, but here is the basic idea of creating a separate "sudoers" file containing just the customized items and locate the file at "/private/etc/sudoers.d/custom_sudoers":
sudo EDITOR=nano visudo -f /private/etc/sudoers.d/custom_sudoers
You use the same rules, layout, and syntax as you would use to edit the main "sudoers" file. "visudo" will also check the syntax and will set the proper file permissions for the "custom_sudoers" file.
You will likely need to sort out the issues with "sudoers" since obviously you have a few issues with it as shown in the error messages:
sudo: /etc/sudoers is world writable
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin
To sort out the issue with your "sudoers" file you will need to post its contents here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.
you may need to make it apfs formatted, which is automatic for High Sierra and above. Lower OSes can't read it.
GUID Partition Table Scheme error when creating bootable USB for Catalina
