Osx Er For Usb Mac App Store

Press Erase. Disk Utility will then ask for an administrator password.

With the release of OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011, Apple officially abandoned physical media for its operating system installations.

Osx Er For Usb Mac App Store

Instead of a traditional disc, customers could now purchase and download OS X directly from the Mac App Store.

This approach brought many benefits, such as not having to keep and safeguard a physical disc, immediate access to the OS when purchased instead of having to wait in line, and server-side updates to the downloadable installer so that the most current version of OS X is always installed when updating new machines.

But what if youve just installed a new hard drive in your Mac and have no version of OS X with the Mac App Store Or what if you dont have a reliable Internet connection In these cases, its always best to have a physical local copy of the OS X installer.

First, youll have to purchase a copy of OS X from the Mac App Store if you dont already have one.

Note that you can always re-download the version of OS X that came with your Mac for free.

As of the date of this article, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is the current OS, although the recently-announced OS X 10.9 Mavericks is right around the corner.

If youve already purchased OS X, open the Mac App Store and head over to the Purchases tab.

Find your desired version of OS X in the list and click the Download button to the right.

OS X is a multi-gigabyte file so the download process may take a while depending on your connection speed.

Quit it by pressing CommandQ; we dont need the installer application, just whats inside it.

Here youll find an app called Install OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or something similar depending on the version of OS X you downloaded from the Mac App Store.

Right-click (or control-click) on this file and select Show Package Contents.

This will reveal the guts of the Installers application package.

Drill down to Contents SharedSupport and find the InstallESD.dmg file.

Now youll need to decide what youd like to use for your installation media.

A USB drive is fast and durable, but you can also burn the image to a bootable dual-layer DVD.

Create an OS X USB Installer Mount your drive or disc of choice to your Mac and launch Disk Utility.

Find your target drive in the list on the left and select the Restore tab on the right.

Drag the InstallESD image from your Desktop and drop it over the Source box, then drag the USB drive from the list in Disk Utility and drop it on the Destination box.

This is telling Disk Utility that we want to take the contents of the OS X Installer image and copy it exactly to our USB drive.

Disk Utility will warn you that this process will delete the contents of your USB drive and ask you for confirmation.

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