Q: Create A Bootable OS X Yosemite DVD/USB Drive

I created the ISO image and was able to boot from it, but when it tries to load the OS, the loading bar stops halfway and gets stuck for hours. Today I'm going to let it go and see if it will finish, but I am doubtful. Has anyone else ran into this problem?

  You can make a bootable USB stick to install using this free program which will do all the work for you.

Bootable USB Flash Drive – Diskmaker X

You should have a backup of your current Mavericks partition on an external drive, in which case, there is no need to create a bootable USB drive or DVD.

Brilliant!!!

Would you have a script that would execute the commands in sequence?  Any help or direction on how to create a script would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

I followed your instruction precisely, using copy/paste for all commands.  However, I get an error when I try to run the script:

iMac27:Install OS X Yosemite.app imac27$ ./makebootableiso.sh

-bash: ./makebootableiso.sh: /bin/bash  : bad interpreter: No such file or directory

Suggestions?

TIA

You are absolutely correct, but this thread is more catered to people who did not have such foresight and are in the unfortunate position of having to recover their one and only partition.

Hello! How do you make an iso of El Capitan with terminal?

I tried your procedure for making a bootable dvd installer.

It works!

The only problem I had was that I was logged into the terminal as root and there is no ~/Desktop/Yosemite.iso.  Anyhow, I just moved the Yosemite.cdr to another directory and then burned it to a dvd using Diskutility.

Thanks a bunch.

Regards,

Don James

Hi tyhwebb13,

I tried your procedure for making a dvd install disk for Yosemite.  It works okay, but hangs up right at the very end of the install at the "Setting up your Mac" screen.  At this point, I turned off my computer by holding down the start button.  I turned the computer on again and booted from the install hard drive.  It booted up and went right back to the "Setting up your Mac" screen and finished the install. 

My computer is a Macpro3,1 with 12 GB of ram.

I was just wondering if anyone else had this same experience.

I think I remember reading somewhere that the Yosemite install works better if the install is a writable medium such as a hard drive or usb thumb drive.

Regards,

donjames

following smae method for El Capitan

hdiutil attach /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg -noverify -nobrowse -mountpoint /Volumes/install_app

hdiutil convert /Volumes/install_app/BaseSystem.dmg -format UDSP -o /tmp/ElCapitan

hdiutil resize -size 8g /tmp/ElCapitan.sparseimage

hdiutil attach /tmp/ElCapitan.sparseimage -noverify -nobrowse -mountpoint /Volumes/install_build

rm /Volumes/install_build/System/Installation/Packages

cp -rp /Volumes/install_app/Packages /Volumes/install_build/System/Installation/

cp -rp /Volumes/install_app/BaseSystem.chunklist /Volumes/install_build

cp -rp /Volumes/install_app/BaseSystem.dmg /Volumes/install_build

hdiutil detach /Volumes/install_app

hdiutil detach /Volumes/install_build

hdiutil resize -size `hdiutil resize -limits /tmp/ElCapitan.sparseimage | tail -n 1 | awk '{ print $1 }'`b /tmp/ElCapitan.sparseimage

hdiutil convert /tmp/ElCapitan.sparseimage -format UDTO -o /tmp/ElCapitan

rm /tmp/ElCapitan.sparseimage

mv /tmp/ElCapitan.cdr ~/Desktop/ElCapitan.iso

If you prefer to make a bootable dvd, you can do it this way:

After downloading the full ElCapitan installer app from the Mac App Store, run these 14 commands in Terminal to create a ElCapitan.iso file and then burn it to a dual layer DVD with Disk Utility. You may then boot up from it by holding the option key down and then install ElCapitan.