Boot From External Drive Mac Os X
Today we’ll be installing MacOS Sierra 10.12.6 on An External Hard Drive or Solid State Drive and boot it on any Laptop or PC running on the latest 7th Gen Kaby Lake or even previous generation processors. Also, we don’t need a MacBook for this. So if you have a Windows Laptop, proceed with this tutorial. It’s like a portable OS disk which can be booted on any compatible Laptop or PC. Plug your external drive into your Mac. Power up (or restart) your Mac. Press down on the Option key while the Mac boots. After a few moments, your Mac should display the Startup Manager, which.
If your Mac suddenly refuses to boot up properly, you might need bootable macOS install USB to make repairs. But how do you create such a disk if all you're left with is a Windows 10 computer? Fortunately, there's a great tool that you can use for free to create bootable macOS media on a USB drive in a Windows 10 environment. This article shows you how to download a macOS DMG file, format a USB drive using a GUID Partition Table, burn the DMG to the drive and boot your Mac from the USB. All the steps except the last one are done on a Windows 10 machine.
- Jun 13, 2016 Booting from an External Device with Boot Manager. This can be done to select any bootable drive connected to the Mac: Connect the respective external drive to the Mac. Reboot the Mac and after the startup press the OPTION key during boot until you get the boot selection menu; Click the external volume to boot from it.
- Dec 28, 2010 Forum discussion: Ok, I just recently picked up a 1.5 Ghz G4 Mac Mini to go with the 1.25 Ghz G4 eMac. I tried installing OS X 10.5 to a external hd via the firewire 400. No matter if I try it on.
- While OS X is installing, your computer will restart a couple of times. Note that when it finally boots into OS X, that is the version running off your external drive. To switch back and forth between the internal and external drive, you have to restart your computer and hold down the OPTION key.
Part 1: Download macOS or Mac OS X DMG File
The first step is to get the DMG disk image file for the version of macOS that you want. You can get a copy of the latest macOS version from Apple download portal or App Store here. There are also several other direct download sites that offer various versions of Mac OS X in DMG format rather than the standard APP format that runs on Mac. Since you're working in a Windows environment, you need the DMG rather than the APP file.
Part 2: Format USB Drive to GPT
Mostly, the USB drive was formmated to FAT32 in default when being shipped out from the factory. However, FAT32 can be only used for installing OS with legacy BISO, which doesn't work for macOS. So the next step is to format your USB drive in the GPT partition style in order to burn installation files to the desired USB drive. You can do this in Command Prompt as admin. In elevated Command Prompt (Ctrl+Shift+Enter), input the following series of commands followed by Enter after each line:
Diskpart
List disk
Select Disk X (X stands for the USB drive name that appears after the previous command)
Clean
Convert GPT
Create partition primary
Part 3: Create Bootable macOS USB from Windows 10
You have now formatted the partition of USB drive. It's time to download UUByte DMG Editor for Windows. Although this is a premium software, you can use the initial free trial period to create a bootable macOS USB drive on Windows 10. After installing the application, follow the sequence of steps shown below:
Step 1: Right-click the software icon on desktop and select 'Run as Administrator' from the contextual menu. Choose 'Run' when prompted.
Step 2: Insert your formatted USB drive, and click 'Burn' ta on the main screen.
Step 3: Click 'Browse' button to import macOS dmg file into the program. And select the USB drive name from the second row. You can also set a volume labe for that USB drive.
Step 4: Click 'Burn' button at the bottom to start the process. You will see a progress bar and wait around 10 minutes to get it done.
Step 5: Once the progress bar is at 100%, a bootable macOS USB is ready. After that, you can use that USB drive for installing macOS.
This is one of the easiest way to create a bootable macOS USB on a Windows PC. The steps are simple and instructions are pretty clear.
Part 4: Boot macOS Install USB on Mac
Now remove the USB drive and insert it into the Mac computer. To boot from the disk, you need to hold down the option key when you hear the boot chime. This will take you to the Startup Disk Manager, where you should be able to see the USB drive. It might have a different name, but as long as it is bootable, you'll be able to see it there. Once you select it, the computer will boot from the disk and the macOS installation will begin.
Conclusion:
The whole process might look a bit complicated if this is your first time, but just follow the instructions in this article and you should be fine. That being said, you need to be careful when downloading the DMG file and formatting your USB drive. If you don't do these two steps correctly, the output drive from the UUByte DMG Editor software won't be bootable, which means you can't install macOS using it, and you may need to do the whole thing over again.
You can run macOS on a Mac in a variety of ways that we have already written an informative article about. In this article, we will focus on Mac startup mode with booting from a USB or an external hard drive.
Starting a Mac with booting from an external disk may be necessary if you need to run another version or copy of macOS, other OS, fix any problems, and so on.
To start the following conditions must be met:
- The computer is based on the Intel system;
- The volume is formatted with the choice of GUID section type;
- Mac OS X v10.4.5 or later is installed on the USB storage device.
Read more:How to Use a External Hard Drive for Time Machine Backups?
Boot From External Hard Drive Mac Os X
How to Boot Mac from an external Hard Drive or USB device?
- Connect a USB flash drive or external hard drive to your Mac.
- Turn on your Mac by pressing the power button or restart your computer if it is already running;
- Hold down the horkey for boots options: Option (Alt) key on the keyboard and hold until the boot menu appears;
- Select the desired volume using the mouse, arrow or trackpad;
- Press the Enter key to boot the Mac from the selected volume.
Boot Mac From External Hd
Conclusion
If Mac won’t boot from USB or volume is not displayed, wait a few seconds for the Download Manager to finish scanning the connected disks or use next tips, if it’s useless here the list of troubleshooting.
macOS does not Boot from an External Drive, what Should I Do?
Boot From External Drive Mac
- Some older external USB drives require additional power. It is possible that it must be connected to an external power source or use a second USB on a Mac;
- Make sure the external drive is turned on (again, the prerogative of old USB-drives);
- Restore the disk access rights and correct the errors on it;
- Make sure the disk is formatted with the choice of partition type GUID;
- Try connecting an external drive to another USB port;
- Make sure the external drive is bootable;
- Connect the drive directly, without using a USB hub.