Optical disc as a Monterey bootable installer

For users with optical drives...

So far, the bootable (a.k.a. stand-alone) installer works best in my environment for installing Monterey. I had made bootable installer optical disks for previous OSs such as Catalina. The task turned out to more challenging for Monterey.

The steps are as listed below. I should highlight that I used Catalina to create the installer due to restrictions with the Disk Utility in Big Sur and Monterey. As the installer requires a fair amount of space, I used a 25GB BD-R (M-disc).

1) Download the Monterey installer image and create a bootable USB key

2) Make a disk image of the USB key using the Disk Utility. The disk image must be created with the DVD/CD master format:

3) Once the disk image (Install macOS Monterey.cdr) has been created, select the disk image but do not mount the image. Right click with Finder to initiate the burn sequence.

After the optical disk has been burned and verified, you can now use an optical drive as a bootable installer (to select, press the option while booting).

- Pie Lover