- How to create a macOS Monterey USB installer disk.
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First, download the macOS Monterey installer
from the Mac App Store.
Once the Mac App Store is open,
just search for Monterey in the search bar.
And then once you find the macOS Monterey installer,
which is right here,
click it to open,
and then just click GET to download.
That will open up Software Update in System Preferences,
and then you can click Download on the prompt.
Now depending on your internet connection speed,
this could take a while,
so you have to be patient,
but I'm gonna speed it up here for brevity's sake.
And once the installer has completed downloading,
you'll see the installer open,
prompting you to install macOS Monterey.
But we don't want to install macOS Monterey,
we wanna create a boot disk,
so you wanna close out by going up to the Menu bar,
selecting Install macOS Monterey,
select Quit Install macOS,
and then select Quit.
That'll close the installer,
and then you can close Software Update.
Next, connect your USB drive.
In this case,
I'm using the SanDisk Portable SSD.
This is a little bit overkill
because it's one terabyte of storage.
But in my case,
I didn't have any spare drive,
so I'm just using this one.
So you wanna open up the Finder
and then select your drive
and then make sure there's nothing
on the drive that you need,
because this is gonna purge everything on the drive.
You simply need a drive
that has at least 16 gigabytes of storage.
Next, format the drive using disk Utility.
So I'm gonna open up Launchpad,
go to my other folder
and then select Disk Utility.
And once that loads up,
you wanna select your external drive.
Now you'll notice my drive is formatted as APFS,
which is not compatible
with the macOS Monterey createinstallmedia tool.
So this is important,
you need to go ahead and select Erase,
and then select macOS Extended Journaled
and then click Erase.
So this is a format that is compatible
with the Create Installer that we're gonna use
to create our boot disk.
All right, once that's completed,
go ahead and click the Done button,
and we're finished with Disk Utility,
so you can go ahead and close that out.
Next we wanna locate the
createinstallmedia executable file.
So open up the Finder,
go to Applications,
find Install macOS Monterey that you downloaded
in the first step and right-click on it,
and select Show Package Contents.
Then double-click on Contents,
double-click on Resources,
and then find createinstallmedia.
Now make sure it's not createinstallmedia yosemite,
or the createinstallmedia dynamic library.
You want this one right here,
so we'll sit this Finder window to the side for now
and go to our next step.
So the next step is opening the Terminal
and creating the boot disk.
Go back to our other folder,
open up Terminal,
and there we go.
So now in the Terminal window,
you wanna type sudo, S-U-D-O, space,
and then drag the createinstallmedia file
from the Finder over to the Terminal,
and drop it like that.
And that'll put the path
of the createinstallmedia executable right in the terminal,
so you don't have to type it manually.
Next up you wanna type in dash dash volume space.
All right, now let's open up the Finder again,
in order to navigate to volumes to find the USB drive.
So open Finder and with the Finder open,
go up to the menu bar,
select Go, select Go to Folder,
and then you wanna go to slash Volumes.
Just like that,
and you should see your USB drive.
In this case,
mine is titled Untitled two,
so just drag that over to the Terminal window,
close out of Finder,
and now we're ready.
So just press the Return key to execute createinstallmedia,
and then type in your administrator password
and when prompted,
type Y and then press Return.
So what the first thing that happens
when you do this is your disk will be erased,
that's why it was so important
to make sure there is nothing important on your drive.
So this will take a little while,
I've sped it up a little bit.
Next is gonna make the disk bootable,
that's why we format it as macOS Extended Journaled,
and once bootable,
it'll copy all the information over to the USB drive.
And again, this will take awhile,
I've sped it up for brevity.
All right, so once you see this message,
we're good to go.
So now you can close out of Terminal,
you can open up the Finder,
select the drive,
you'll see the macOS Monterey installer,
and now we can simply eject the drive.
And once ejected,
you can simply remove the drive from your Mac,
and store it for future usage.
So this drive is handy
because it means you can re-install Mac OS without having
to re-download macOS.
So if you need to quickly re-install,
you can do so,
so let me just walk you through briefly
how to use this drive.
First, connect it to your Mac,
and if you're on a Mac with Apple Silicon,
all you do is shut down your Mac
and then press and hold the Power button.
On an Intel Mac,
you would hold the Option key while restarting
until you see the boot selector,
but here on an M1 enabled Mac,
or an M1 pro,
or M1 max enabled Mac,
you simply hold the Power button
and you wanna continue holding it
even after you see the Apple logo.
You can see it says,
"Continue holding for start-up options,"
and then once you see,
this right here loading start-up options,
you can release the Power button
and it will continue to boot up,
and then it will present you with the ability
to start up using your boot disk
to re-install macOS Monterrey.
So you do have to be a little bit patient here,
because this will take a little of time.
Eventually, you'll see options,
and then you'll see the loading indicator below that.
And again, you just have to be a little bit patient.
Eventually, you will see the Install macOS Monterrey option.
So yeah, anytime now, (chuckles)
there you go.
Install macOS Monterrey,
you can see it right there,
and all you do is select that option.
If you already have an installation on your Mac,
it'll load up macOS Recovery,
and ask you to verify with your administrator password
before allowing you to continue with the installation.
So in that case,
you can see it right here.
All right, so all you would do is just select your user.
Go ahead and click on Next,
type in your administrator password.
Click continue.
And then here we go,
it's gonna load up the macOS Monterrey installer.
You can click Continue,
and in just a second,
you can agree,
and then agree again.
And once you do that,
it's gonna allow you to select the destination
of the installation.
So that's it,
that's how you create a macOS Monterrey install drive.
Hope this was able to help you out.
Let me know if you have any questions
or comments down below.
This is Jeff with the 9to5Mac.
(bright piano music)