- How's it going ladies and gentlemen
in this video I'm gonna show you
how to create a MacOs Big Sur USB Installer drive
this bootable USB drive is super simple
and super easy to create.
I'm gonna show you how to do it right now.
Check it out.
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Okay, so the first step is to create the USB Installer drive
and I'm using this drive from SanDisk.
It includes a USB A and USB C connection.
So it's super handy to use.
Connect the drive to your Mac,
you wanna make sure there's nothing on this drive
that you need to save because everything will be erased.
You wanna at least an eight gigabyte drive
for this USB Installer.
The next step is to download the MacOs Big Sur installer.
Now once this goes live in public,
you can find it on the App Store.
But before that, you can also download it in beta form.
You can download it from beta.apple.com.
You'll of course need to enroll in the beta program.
Or if you're a developer,
you can download it from Apple's developer portal as well.
So three options there.
Number one, Mac App Store once it goes live,
number two beta.apple.com for the public beta.
And number three, if you're a developer,
you can download it that way.
So doesn't matter which version you download,
because once you download the MacOs Big Sur installer,
you're going to see something that looks like this.
And this is beta because it's the beta version,
but on the public version, it'll just say MacOs Big Sur.
So once you see this installer
appear on screen after downloading,
you can just close the installer out
by going to the menu bar
and selecting quit install MacOs,
and that'll close out of the installer.
The next step is to open up Disk Utility
in applications utilities.
You can find it via Launchpad by going to the other folder,
and then open up and find your drive in Disk Utility.
It's gonna be under the external section.
Just click on that.
Now what I like to do do is to right click
and select Show and finder
just to make sure there's nothing on that drive
that you wanna save.
Because like I said,
we're gonna remove and delete everything on that drive.
So you wanna select the drive click the erase button,
because we wanna make sure this thing
is formatted as MacOs Extended journaled.
You cannot use an APFS formatted drive
to create this installer.
So once you have MacOs Extended journaled selected,
click the erase button,
you can have it named anything by the way,
doesn't really matter.
Go ahead and click Done.
And now we can close out of the disk utility.
The next step is to open up our finder
click on applications.
You wanna find where it says install MacOs Big Sur,
you wanna right click on the installer
and then select show package contents.
Open up the contents folder, open up resources,
and then find where it says create install media.
So just keep your place here.
We're gonna come back to the Finder in just a second.
The next step to open up a terminal window,
you can find that in the application Utilities folder,
you can also get to it quickly from Launchpad
by going to the other folder and selecting terminal.
So here we are.
In the terminal window you wanna type sudo s-u-d-o space.
So let's do it now, s-u-d-o,
and then press space on the space bar to create a space.
Now go back to finder and drag create install media
over to the terminal window like this and release.
That will paste the path of create install media
right in the terminal window.
And the space will automatically be added afterwards.
Now you wanna type dash, dash volume and then another space.
So your terminal window should look just like this.
Now go back to finder
and then you wanna go up to the menu bar and select Go.
Go to folder and then type forward slash volumes
and then click Go.
This will show all the mounted volumes on your Mac.
All right, so there we go.
There's untitled.
That's the name of the disk
that we just formatted in Disk Utility.
And it's always a good idea to double click on that drive,
make sure that's the actual drive.
There's nothing there.
Okay, so now we wanna drag this volume over to the terminal,
and release, it's going to paste in the volume location,
just like that.
And now we're ready to go.
So that's all we need to get started,
we're gonna go ahead and close out of the Finder window.
Let's zoom in here on the terminal window,
because we're gonna be focused here
for the next few minutes.
So you wanna press return on your keyboard
to submit the command into your administrator password,
and then press return.
And then it's gonna ask if you are sure
that you want to continue.
So you wanna press the Y key on your keyboard to accept
and then press return.
It's going to erase the disk first,
and then it's gonna copy all the installer data
to that USB drive.
And this is gonna take a while I've sped it up considerably.
So just be patient,
it's gonna take several minutes to complete.
Now it makes the disk bootable copies over the boot files.
And there we go. We're done.
Now, like I said, I've sped this up a lot,
so it's gonna take you a little bit longer.
So just be patient.
But this is what you should see once everything's completed.
Now we can close out of the terminal.
So we can actually open up that drive in the Finder
and see that now it is not untitled anymore,
but yes, it is the MacOs installer, for Big Sur.
Alright, so the next step is to alter
the Secure Boot settings for the destination Mac.
So with our Mac powered off,
I'm holding the command and R key while firing up our Mac
it automatically turns on the laptop.
So you wanna wait about five seconds into the Apple logo,
then you can release it'll boot into recovery mode.
We need to go in here and alter
some of the startup security settings,
to allow us to boot from that USB drive.
So MacOs recovery is gonna ask you for the password
for the user you select.
We're gonna just enter that right now.
All right, so here we are in MacOs utilities,
we actually just wanna go up to the menu bar
and select utilities in the minibar,
because we wanna find the startup security utility.
So click on that,
and then you'll have to authenticate again.
So we'll go ahead and authenticate.
Just go ahead and click where it says enter MacOs password,
select your user there, and then put in your password.
All right, click Okay. And here it is.
So the first section is for secure boot.
And then the second section is for allowed boot media.
So under secure boot, we wanna select medium security
and this will allow
any version of sign operating system software
ever trusted by Apple.
Now when I try to boot with a full security enabled,
I was basically put in a loop
in the T2 chip basically would not allow me to proceed.
And also be sure to check allow booting from external
or removable media.
Once you have those two options selected,
you can go ahead and close out
of this secure startup utility.
But make sure it looks like this,
especially that last option
for allow booting from removable media,
you definitely need that checked.
Otherwise, you won't be able to boot
from the USB drive at all.
So now that that's done,
you wanna go ahead and plug in your USB drive,
hold the Option key while powering on your Mac,
and you wanna hold option
until that startup selector appears,
which is right here.
So I have my normal Macintosh HD drive.
And I also have install MacOs Big Sur.
So we wanna select Install MacOs Big Sur,
and then press return on the keyboard.
This is gonna boot from that USB drive.
And that's what's happening right now
booting directly from this USB drive.
Which will allow me to install MacOs Big sur.
So initially, it's going to boot into MacOs recovery.
And here we go.
And I'm gonna speed this portion up just a little bit.
Alright, so now I'm gonna go ahead and select my user
and click Next.
Enter my user password.
And here we are.
So since this is a beta, I like to create a separate volume
and install the beta there.
So I'm just gonna go to disk utility
and I'm gonna create a new volume
specifically for the Big Sur beta.
Now, once the public version comes out,
you don't have to do this if you don't want to,
you can just upgrade directly to MacOs Big Sur
and place that right on your current hard drive
if you wish to do that.
But here I'm just going into the Disk Utility,
I'm creating a new volume,
and I'm gonna call it beta in this case.
And I'm going to install the MacOs Big Sur beta,
right here on this volume.
Now once the public version of MacOs Big Sur comes out,
you have options,
you can create a new volume as I've done here,
you can upgrade your existing MacOs installation,
or you can delete your MacOs install and start from scratch.
It's up to you.
So now we're going to install MacOs Big Sur.
So just select Install MacOs and then click Continue.
And then this is going to give us options
as to where we want to deploy the install.
Alright, so you just wanna click Continue again.
Alright, now click Agree, and then click Agree again.
And now it's gonna ask you where you want to install MacOs.
You can install it own your current existing
in that space that'll be going to perform an upgrade.
Or you can do like I did create a new APFS volume,
I selected beta, which is my new volume, click Continue,
and then click Continue again.
And that will begin the installation of MacOs Big Sur.
So right now everything's been deployed
from this USB Installer drive.
And this will take a while
this is gonna take several minutes.
And when I say minutes,
I'm meaning more like half an hour to 45 minutes,
depending on various factors,
but just be patient in other words.
I've sped this up a whole lot,
multiple times over here to get through it.
So you're not sitting here waiting.
I just wanted to show you the end result
of what you can expect.
And in just a second, there we go.
We'll see the Setup Utility here in just a second.
And there we go.
So there's the Setup Utility
asking you to select your country or region
and that will walk you through
the MacOs installation for Big Sur.
So ladies and gentlemen, there really isn't that much to it.
It's a pretty simple exercise
creating that USB Installer drive.
Just really handy to have that available.
Just tuck it somewhere where you can always find it
just in case you happen to need it.
So ladies and gentlemen, if you appreciated this video,
leave me a thumbs up
that helps other people find it as well.
And let me know what you think
down below in the comment section.
This is Jeff with the 9to5Mac.
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