Anyone else with no sound in Mail?

Would that extra USB drive need to be bootable? If so, would executing the Installer on the first USB drive include the means to make it so automatically?

As you can see, John's kindly replied as well. Re his last sentence there, I followed through 'steps for reinstalling macOS', reading what would be involved, but the implication was that I'd have to use either Cmd-R or Cmd-Opt-R to get into OSX Utilities. That being so, if I then selected Reinstall OSX, I think it'd install a long sequence of downloads from the Internet (as per my original attempt at upgrading from Mavericks to Sierra), including all my personal settings (which clearly in this situation I don't want). This is why I thought that perhaps if I were to use my prepared Installer USB disk to put a presumed clean copy of Sierra on to a further external USB disk, it might avoid all that.

Si and John,

Last week I ordered online a further USB stick, so that eventually I could use the first one to install Sierra on to it. I'd then be able to switch between Mavericks and Sierra and see how Sierra performs in its 'cleanest' state. I'm still waiting for the delivery but it should be imminent now.

By all accounts, Sierra has had to be patched quite a lot by Apple and I gather that Apple's released a Combo Update. I think it's available from their Downloads website. Once I've managed to get the basic Sierra on to the second USB stick, how can I then update it with this Combo download? Will the Combo go into my current Applications folder and automatically install, or will I have some control over it? In other words, will I be able to point it to the particular disk (in this case, an external one) for which it's needed?

As I see it, with the arrangement I'll have, the Combo Update may well install into a Sierra that's chosen and open and running, but that will not of itself update the Sierra on the USB stick. Is it the case that you may well be able to install and run Sierra from an external drive but only by sacrificing updates to it?

The ordered new USB stick arrived an hour ago.

Point taken about the download of Sierra very likely containing the Combo Update. Didn't think of that one.

If I understand your last few words there, any UPDATE to Sierra that might become necessary in the future you're saying I could apply to Sierra on the second USB stick by simply pointing the update download to it. But surely OSX UPDATES get applied automatically, once they've been downloaded, don't they? With updates, there's no option offered as to where they should be applied; they go straight into the Applications folder and are immediately executed, leaving no copy of the update around (unlike with OSX UPGRADES and third-party applications). So, it seems to me that I'd have to forego any updates later on and would, if I found the update an imperative, instead have to delete everything on the first USB stick and re-run the entire process of downloading the Sierra Installer again and putting it back on the first USB stick.

I've no idea as to precisely which version of Sierra (with Installer) I downloaded from the Apps Store about a week ago, but unless Apple has in the meantime issued a further Sierra update, it was the latest one (v.10.12.4).

Si,

Been busy with a number of other things these last few days but I hope to finally put a good 'clean' copy of Sierra on to the second USB stick this weekend and see how it performs. So, watch this space. I'm sure you'll be interested in what transpires, especially as you're an iMac user like me. There'll be a lot of configuring to do, as my machine's very much personalised. Actually, it's just struck me that any such configuring will be lost every time I switch between Mavericks and Sierra. I don't think I'll bother re-downloading and re-installing my two main third-party apps, because of the hassle of it all and because fortunately, before, they seemed to still work okay under Sierra.

Yes, in principle I'd permanently install Sierra on to my machine if the test version of it turns out to be okay. However, I have to admit that I'm quite wedded to Mavericks. At present, there isn't a lot that's wrong with it, on my machine. Who knows, in the end I might simply forego Sierra and instead wait until Apple releases the next version of OSX. That can't be too long from now, surely. But then again, a new OSX usually means a new set of bugs and an inevitable wait before they're sorted out by Apple.

Just a quick reply: I never ever 'auto update', I only ever download any updates manually. That way, I know what I'm downloading and why. I can assure you 100% that there's no user intervention possible with normal updates, even the manual sorts.

I'm afraid there'll never be the possibility of running Sierra in some sort of dual-boot arrangement on my main drive, as my main drive is already partititioned three ways, two of them being reserved for high-capacity datafiles.

Sat a/noon: I duly formatted the second USB stick to Mac OS Extended Journaled and GUID, and progressed through the process of an install of Sierra on to it, but was forced to abort it, I'm afraid.

First of all, I was surprised that, in the very first part of the process that, having chosen "Install macOS Sierra" from the startup devices, I had to sit and wait for about 5 mins with just a blank screen and an unlabeled progress bar, before I was ever presented with the macOS Utilities screen. Goodness knows what OSX was doing in all of that time.

Then, when it came to choosing the device (drive) on to which to install Sierra, I was informed that the drive wasn't big enough. Well, I'd have thought 15.66GB fully formatted would have been more than enough, so I'm baffled by that. All I could do at that point was to abort the whole exercise. Naturally, I checked in System Information that the formatting of the entire new external USB stick was correct.

I don't want to have to buy yet another USB stick, and that's on the assumption of course that OSX was correct in what it was telling me. Off the top of my head, my only option now, if I want to pursue this to the bitter end, is to take one of my other USB sticks that I use for backing up datafiles of mine - a 32GB stick - and to transfer its files to the 15.66GB stick, thereby freeing it up for use in this 'clean Sierra' experiment. That'll all involve some reformatting, etc. At this very moment, I'm not even sure if 15.66GB is going to be big enough for those datafiles.

It would have had to have been some slowdown! My arithmetic shows that installing around 6 GB should take no more than about 4 mins at a USB speed of 200 Mbps. Even if you allow for two USB sticks and reckon that the effective speed drops to, let's say, 50M bps, that's still only 32 mins total. In the end, anyway, no more transfers were happening; the destination drive just sat there, inactive, and I was left with a progress bar that then never moved any further.

Unfortunately, I'm not inclined to waste any more time or money on this. As you'll appreciate, it was a diversion from my original topic, anyway. But it would have been nice to have had Sierra on a USB stick so that I could run it, hopefully as a clean install, and assess it.

But here's an interesting observation. In the aftermath I thought I'd take a look at what actually got written on to the 32GB USB drive. Of the visible folders, it was the usual four - System (7.74 GB), Library (1.11 GB), Applications (979.1 MB), Users (6KB). Undoubtedly, some of these are now corrupted because of the emergency abort that I performed, but it might be useful for you to compare those folder sizes with those of your own edition of Sierra, to see if at least System and Library here look sensible. The stick hadn't reached a bootable state, though, because looking in System Preferences > Startup Disk, only the Mavericks drive is listed. Those sizes suggest that a total of about 10GB should have been sufficient space, so goodness knows why I was forced into using a 32GB drive. Perhaps the destination drive gets used as a temporary buffer area?

In time, I'll be interested to see whether you yourself ever achieve a Sierra-on-a-stick. I agree that running the Sierra Installer from the Mac, rather than from the first USB stick, would have made for easier and quicker execution. As you may recall, it just happened that I'd previously put the Installer on to a stick and so merely installing into another stick seemed, at least in principle, quite straightforward and wouldn't have risked any slipup on my part by otherwise doing it from the Mac's Application folder. Do you actually get a choice of destination drive when it's run from the Applications folder? I don't recall a choice before.