This guide deals with 3 ways of making a boot disk from OSX 10.9 Mavericks the first one is the fastest and is done via the Terminal from a new command already in OSX Mavericks called createinstallmedia , the other 2 are older ways when Mavericks was in development and are done with a mixture of finder using Disk Utility and command line.
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- Restore Dmg To Usb Mac Terminal 2
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Quickest Way
- If your Mac is really old - as in so old it's running Mac OS X Snow Leopard or older - it will not have a Recovery partition, the only way to reinstall the OS is to use the discs that shipped with.
- Nov 14, 2019 Insert the USB flash drive into one of your Mac's USB ports. Restart your Mac. When your Mac's screen turns off, hold down the option key while your Mac reboots. You will be presented with the OS X Startup Manager, listing all bootable devices attached to your Mac.
Download Mac OSX 10.9Mavericks but don’t install.
Oct 23, 2013 This guide deals with 3 ways of making a boot disk from OSX 10.9 Mavericks the first one is the fastest and is done via the Terminal from a new command already in OSX Mavericks called createinstallmedia, the other 2 are older ways when Mavericks was in development and are done with a mixture of finder using Disk Utility and command line.
Attach your USB stick/drive.
Launch the Terminal from /Applications/Utilities and enter the command below and then your password when prompted, be sure to change the ‘Untitled‘ name in the below command to your external disk name:
Let it do its thing and there you have it, one bootable Mac OSX 9 drive.
This really is a super simple way – however if using the Terminal fills you with fear and dread, there are some GUI apps that can get the job done namely DiskMakerX and a new imaging tool that can clone a new disk very quickly – AutoDMG.
Alternative Ways of building a Bootable Mavericks OSX Disk.
To make a boot disk of OSX 10.9 Mavericks, first of all get the app or download via the App store, if downloaded it will file in the folder Applications.
Control / Left click Options, Show in Finder to get to the app, don’t install at this stage.
Located in the Applications Folder
Finding the InstallESD.dmg
To find the actual InstallESD.dmg file, control/left click the ‘Install OS X Mavericks’ app and choose show contents – then navigate to Shared Support folder.
Control/Right click to show contents
Navigate to Shared Support folder to see the InstallESD.dmg file
Mount InstallESD.dmg
Double click to mount the image.
Make Invisible Files Visible
We need to see the BaseSystem.dmg inside the InstallESD.dmg
Crank open Terminal and run:
This will show all invisible files have a look inside the mounted InstallESD.dmg
Mount an External Disk
Attach a USB/external drive – this guide uses the external drive name calledBootDisk, you need to make sure the format is correct, it needs to be Mac OSX Extended Journaled – it its not you can format that in Disk Utility.
Launch Disk Utility
Launch Disk Utility as found in Applications/Utilities and go to the Restore tab.
Drag BaseSystem.dmg to the Source field and your external disk to the Destination and click Restore.
This will mount your new OSX 10.9 external disk and name it OSX Base System – but we need to add the packages.
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Fix the Packages
Couple of things to fix in the newly created boot disk, remove the Packagealias at System/Installation/ folder
Now from the previously mounted InstallESD.dmg copy over the Packages folder to the same location where we just removed the alias above.
Will take a while as it holds all the install packages.
Job done now you can boot from the OSX 10.9 disk.
Make the Visible back to Invisible
If you want all to return back to normal and hide the system files run a couple more commands in the Terminal
How to create the OSX 10.9 Mavericks Bootable Drive just via Terminal
Just for the crazy ones……after Mavericks is downloaded….and again this assumes you external disk is named BootDisk
Mount the InstallESD.dmg buried deep in the app
Swap to the newly mounted image
This puts you back in the Finder in front of the newly mounted InstallESD.dmg, go back to Terminal and clone the BaseSystem.dmg to the remote USB drive
This will change ‘BootDisk‘ to ‘OS X Base System‘
Remove the existing Packages alias link from the newly restored image
Restore Dmg To Usb Mac Terminal 2
Copy the full OSX Mavericks Packages over to the new image….takes a while
And there it is! – to eject the new bootable USB OSX Mavericks 10.9 disk ‘cd’ to home and eject
Now you can boot up from your newly bootable disk and either Install OSX10.9 on another device or use the Terminal/Disk Utility or Firmware Password Utilities on another device.
On every OS X Lion installation a hidden partition is created to enable a method for Lion to be reinstalled on the machine, it is known as the recovery partition or drive and is 650mb in size.
If you bought a new machine from Apple you have OS X 10.7 already installed – but no back up disk! and since you haven’t bought the OSX Lion 10.7 App from the App store you can’t re-download it – so thats why you have the recovery drive as a partition in your main hard drive and to boot from it you need to restart the machine holding down “command” + “r” keys.
From recovery mode you can run Disk Utility, get online help and do a restore from a Time Machine backup and re-install Lion leaving all your other files intact – it just replaces the core operating system.
You can make a bootable USB drive or disk of the recovery drive, but involves a small trip to the Terminal….
1) Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities and run:
The primary drive in this list is No.2 with the “Identifier” of disk0s2, the boot recovery drive is disk0s3
We can also identify the recovery drive by the name and the size – set at 650mb
2) Mount the drive:
Output should be:
Now the Recovery HD is mounted in the Finder and you can see it in the sidebar under Devices
Navigate to it from the sidebar – Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot/BaseSystem.dmg.
3) Doubleclick BaseSystem.dmg to mount it also in the sidebar. This will mount the volume ” Mac OSX Base System”
Mount Dmg To Usb
mac-osx-lion-base-system
4) Open Disk Utility in /Applications/Utilities
5) Put in a 2GB+ USB drive, let Disk Utility load it. The USB drive needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended Journaled, if its not, its time to format it in Disk Utility…
6) Finally in still in Disk Utility, select the “Restore” tab – drag the mounted volume “Mac OSX Base System” into the Source field and drag the USB drive “Volume” (mine is called SuperBootUSBDrive) to the Destination.
restore-volume-osx-usb
7) Click Restore – 25 minutes later – One bootable USB drive
Your bootable USB drive will be called “Mac OS X Base System” after the restore is complete. Now to boot from it just select it as the Start Up disk in System Preferences or hold down option key on boot and select it from the choice of bootable devices.
If you have downloaded the Lion App from the App Store then you can also make a boot disk/drive from this, guide is here, you need to make the boot drive/disk before you install the Lion App, as the installer is deleted after running it. Thats why the guide here can get you out of trouble.
Couple of footnotes on this – Apple has released a knowledgebase article about the recovery partition, also just released from Apple is an app that will do the same as above.
Mac Restore Dmg To Usb
Update For Newer Models – hidden BaseSystem.dmg
Restore Dmg To Usb Mac Terminal 1
If you have the latest models from Apple that came already shipped with OSX 10.7, then you may not have the “BaseSystem.dmg” but instead see a “BaseSystem.chunklist” , the “BaseSystem.dmg” is there it’s just hidden.
To show it so you can see it in the finder – go to Terminal – enter:
Now it will be visible in the Finder.
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