If you have a spare USB flash drive laying around, you should consider putting it to good use by creating a bootable installation drive for the OS X El Capitan Beta.
Creating a bootable drive has many benefits and uses. For starters, it makes it easy to install a fresh copy of whatever operating system you have configured on the drive. Secondly, it makes it easy to install an operating system on a separate partition, or on a virtual machine. Lastly, it’s just smart business to always have a quickly accessible and portable installation media laying around.
In this tutorial and video walkthrough, I’ll show you how to create a bootable USB drive for OS X El Capitan in just a few easy steps
Note: your USB flash drive must be at least 8GB in size. Ensure that there’s nothing on the drive that you wish to keep, as this process will completely erase the drive including any volumes.
The drive creation take about 30 minutes total, but your mileage may vary. Just be patient.
Step 1: Connect the flash drive to your Mac
Step 2: Download and install the latest version of DiskMakerX
Step 3: Run DiskMakerX
Step 4: Click Yosemite (10.10) since there is no option available for El Capitan currently
Step 5: Click Select an Install file…
Step 6: In the Applications folder, select Install OS X 10.11 and click Choose
Step 7: Click An 8 GB USB thumb drive
Step 8: Select your USB flash drive and click Choose this disk
Step 9: Click Erase then create the disk
Step 10: Click Continue
Step 11: Enter your administrator password when requested
Step 12: Once the process is completed, click Quit
You can now eject your USB key and keep it handy for future usage. You may choose to rename the name of the drive to El Capitan instead of Yosemite. Since DiskMakerX doesn’t yet have an El Capitan option, it will name it Yosemite.
In future tutorials I will show you different methods for installing OS X El Capitan on your Mac, including via Virtual Machine and on a separate partition, using this bootable drive.
What do you think about the method of creating a bootable USB flash drive? Sound off with your thoughts and opinions down below.
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