Sunday, September 19, 2021

Creating OS X Mavericks (or macOS) Bootable USB Drive

When downloading OS X Mavericks from App Store, the installer file's name might be something like  "Install OS X Mavericks.app" and stored in /Application folder.  Double click on the file would launch the installer then lead to restarting machine and installing the OS X Mavericks. 

But, OS X Mavericks was not available on App Store anymore so I downloaded it from someone else's backup on the net. He renamed the file "Install OS X Mavericks.app" to "Mavericks.app" and wrapped it in a DMG file.

I'm using MacBook Air running macOS Big Sur to make this bootable USB drive, just in case my machine fails to boot for some reasons.

Method 1

1. Prepare a USB stick with at least 6 GB then open DiskUtility to format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and name it as InstallOSXMavericks.

2. Double click on the DMG file in Finder to mount it and copy the Mavericks.app to the /Applications folder.

3. Open Terminal and run the following command:

sudo /Applications/Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/InstallOSXMavericks --applicationpath /Applications/Mavericks.app --nointeraction

NOTE: For macOS Sierra, the command might fail with the error message below:

/Volumes/NAK-InstallMacOSSierra is not a valid volume mount point.

If it does, run the following command:

sudo plutil -replace CFBundleShortVersionString -string "12.6.03" /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/Info.plist

4. Restart the machine. Before it starts, press and hold Option key until the boot menu shows up. Choose Install OS X Mavericks and wait to see if it's really bootable.

Method 2

1. Make sure DiskUtility has Full Disk Access permission. If not, assign it the permission, and here is how.

2. Prepare a USB stick with at least 6 GB then open DiskUtility to format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and name it as InstallOSXMavericks.

3. Open Finder then double click on the installer file (DMG) to mount it

4. Navigate to the mounted image file then right click on Mavericks.app and select Show Package Contents. After that, open this folder Contents > SharedSupport and double click on InstallESD.dmg file to mount and show it in DiskUtility.

5. Select the USB drive from the side bar then click Restore and choose InstallESD.dmg from "Restore from" combobox and click Restore again.

6. When the restore completes, restart the machine. Before it starts, press and hold Option key until the boot menu shows up. It would not show Install OS X Mavericks like in Method 1 but EFI instead. Choose EFI then wait to see if it's really bootable. There can be another bootable device showing as EFI too. This is confusing and need to guess and try.  


NOTE: I used Method 1 to create a bootable USB for macOS Big Sur too and it worked.

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