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How to create a USB boot drive for my computer using the recovery volume?

Hi again,

I cannot get nor will I be able to in the near future get high speed broadband internet. I have to use the limited allocation of 50GB/month Mobile Hotspot through my phone provider. This means that downloading 12GB install files is not an option.

As always when upgrading to a new OS (No, I do not have a Time Machine backup, and I always do clean installs when I install a new OS with very few exceptions), I create install media for the current OS should things go south. Since this Mac came with Big Sur, it does not have the "Install Mac OS Big Sur.app" in the Applications folder. This is a real problem. I want to update to Monterey in the not too distant future, but before I even consider that, I want to make sure I have a bootable USB drive of the OS that is currently running on my system, in this case an M1, 2020 Mac Mini.

I booted into the recovery options on my Mac Mini, and saw that a copy of the "Install macOS..." etc .app file exists in a highly restricted and invisible section of my hard drive. I need to copy that app out into the main OS so I can use the createinstallmedia command and create a backup USB installer drive.

How do I do this?

Thanks everyone!

Mac mini, macOS 11.4

Posted on Nov 6, 2021 9:36 PM

Top-ranking reply

AProApps-User Author

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Nov 7, 2021 8:34 AM

For what it is worth, if anyone has not seen this, I found this as well, and so far it seems to work. The package file unpacks the install app, which then works with createinstallmedia

https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-big-sur-full-installer-database-download-directly-from-apple/

As an update, I did boot into the recovery tools and tried to use the cli to copy the app to an external drive, but I had a few issues and only got about 25mb of it. I know why, but after doing some research, I found that the aforementioned site works just fine for me.

Hope this helps someone else! :D

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How to create a USB boot drive for my computer using the recovery volume?

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