Format Flash Drive For Bootable Mac



  1. Best Format For Usb Flash Drive
  2. Format Usb Bootable Windows 10
  3. Format Flash Drive For Bootable Mac Os
  4. Format Flash Drive Mac Fat32

If you’re using both Windows and macOS, you’ve to deal with when mac refuses to boot. The reason behind can be from a number of things that could go wrong. This includes system failure, bad updates, power failure, hardware failure. Unless there is a hardware problem that only can be diagnosed at the apple center you can fix your Apple computer.

Connect your drive. To format an external storage device, connect it to one of the ports on your.

It is an excellent practice always to have a bootable macOS USB, which you can easily create using macOS operating system. But since we’re here, you probably can want to make bootable USB using Windows 10. Let’s be real, and there are more Windows computers compared to MAC. Fortunately, you can use a Windows computer to create a bootable USB flash drive.

  • Here’s how: Insert the flash drive or hard drive you want to format for Windows compatibility. Go to the Applications folder on your Mac’s hard drive, then go to the Utilities folder, and launch Disk Utility. Select the drive you want to format.
  • After making a Bootable USB drive for installing Operating Systems like Ubuntu via Pen drive using softwares like PowerISO, when you format your pen drive using Windows or Ubuntu it will show about only 2 MB of memory in a 4 GB pen drive. Follow the steps to format the pen drive properly and restore it back to its original condition.

In this article, we’ll help you with the instructions to create a bootable MacOS USB installation media from a Windows 10 computer. So that you can use that USB to install or reinstall (upgrade) Apple’s MacOS. You can create a macos Catalina/sierra bootable USB using this guide to fix your operating system.

What’s needed?

Format Flash Drive For Bootable Mac

You will need a few things before you get started. The first essential thing in it is a USB drive would be awesome if you use a USB 3.0, but you can get the work done using slow USB as well. So, in contrast, you need these following things.

  1. One high-quality USB flash drive with 16GB of storage.
  2. TransMac software.
  3. MacOS operating system image (DMG file).

How to Create a macos Catalina bootable usb

The guide is simple and straightforward if you follow thiese step.

Download and install TransMac on your Windows PC. It’s paid software with 15-day trial, so you can use it within the time to create a bootable MacOS USB flash drive. If you like the software and to support the developer you can buy the full version.

Plug the USB drive to your Windows computer that you’ll be using to fix your MacOS. And we are going to tell you something straightforward – backup if things stored in USB Drive.

Step 1. Open the TransMac, and select Run as administrator. If you’re using the trial version, wait 15 seconds, and click Run.

Step 2. Use your USB drive right-click on it and select format disk format this will format the USB drive so that it can be used to store the Mac OS operating system. One thing you need took care of that the USB drive needs in GPT partition in order to work on a Mac computer otherwise it won’t boot.

When it prompts select a name for your USB it doesn’t matter but just do it and click ok. If the formatting completed successfully, click OK to continue.

Step 3. Again from the left sidebar right-click on the USB drive and select restore with disk image.

Step 4. Now browse to the location where the Mac OS system image file is located and click ok to load it.

Step 5. Click Yes to create the macOS USB bootable media.

It will take a few minutes to complete the process because the Mac Operating System is larger than any other operating systems like Windows and LINUX in size. Now plug the USB drive to Mac computer in order to install, install or upgrade the operating system to the latest version of Mac OS, which can be Sierra or later.

THE TOOL CAN

  • Apple File System (APFS) volume read support.
  • Open Mac APFS/HFS/HFS+ format disk drives, flash drives, CD/DVD/Blu-ray media, HD floppies, dmg, dmgpart, sparsebundle and sparseimage files.
  • Copy files to Mac HFS+ disks and dmg images.
    Format as HFS+ for Mac .
  • Save and restore images of disks and flash drives.
  • Create, compress, expand and split dmg files.
  • Built in burner functionality to burn ISO and dmg files directly to CD/DVD/Blu-Ray.
  • Read Mac multisession and hybrid CDs.
  • View partition layout.

How to create a GPT partition on a USB flash drive

If the USB flash drive is not working using TransMac, it could be still a partition problem. In this case, you want to redo the entire process again, but this time use the following steps to use the Diskpart command-line utility on Windows to create the appropriate GPT partition.

  1. Open Command Prompt as an administrator. Type cmd in run dialog or open it from the start menu.
  2. Type the diskpart command and press Enter. This will display that is connected to your computer.
  3. Enter the list disk command to view all drives connected to your computer and press Enter. This command will show all of the partitions inside of a disc.
  4. Type the select disk command followed the number assigned for the USB flash drive (e.g., select disk 4), and press Enter. This command will select the disc partition of your choice.
  5. Enter the clean command and press Enter. This erases and formats the disc.
  6. Type the convert GPT command and press Enter. This convert master boot record to new GPT.
  7. Enter the create partition primary command and press Enter to complete the process.
Format

Quickly create a macOS bootable USB on Windows

Now make bootable USB using the TransMac software (follow instructions that are given above). Now connect the USB and power on your Mac computer while holding the option key and then select the USB Flash media to run the installation.

Learn using USB on MAC (Apple support page)

Learn more about making bootable USB.

Article Contents

To troubleshoot an issue with Windows 10 (especially boot-related issues), it can be handy to boot into Windows 10 not installed on a Boot Camp partition. It is relatively straightforward to create a bootable USB Flash drive to boot to the Windows 10 installer and open up a DOS prompt for troubleshooting.

What is needed

  1. USB Flash drive (8 GB or larger recommended)
  2. Windows 10 Installer ISO for Windows 10

Preparation

Format flash drive mac fat32

All the preparation is done in macOS on the Mac that is having an issue booting Windows. It is important to use this Mac since it will be used to identify the correct Windows drivers.

USB Flash Drive

The USB Flash drive must be formatted as exFAT.

  1. Insert an 8GB or larger flash drive into a USB port on the Mac
  2. In Disk Utility, format the Flash drive as exFAT. Quit Disk Utility after this operation completes.

Best Format For Usb Flash Drive

Boot Camp Driver

Open Boot Camp Assistant in the Utilities folder and download the current Windows Support Software from the “Action” dropdown in the menu bar. Save the Windows Support Software to your desktop or other location. Do not save directly to the USB Flash Drive.

Format Usb Bootable Windows 10

Windows Install Media

Download the current install media from the Microsoft website. Windows will not be installed, but the install media will give access to the command line tools in Windows. Select the version of Windows that is closest to the version of Windows installed on the Mac (Windows 8, Windows 10). It does not matter what edition of Windows is used, since Windows is not going to be installed.

Create Recovery USB Flash Drive

To create the USB Flash drive, follow these steps:

  1. Mount the Windows ISO downloaded from Microsoft. To mount the ISO, double-click on the ISO in Finder.
  2. Drag all the files and folders from the mounted ISO to the USB flash drive.
  3. Drag the contents of the Windows Support Software to the USB flash drive.
  4. If there is not an AutoUnattend.xml at the top level of the drive (as shown below), download AutoUnattend.xml, unzip it, and add it to the drive. AutoUnattend.xml provides the location of the $WinPEDriver$ folder to load the drivers during boot.
  5. The 2018 MacBook Air (and potentially Macs after that) cannot load the IntelMEI driver and give a “Windows Setup could not install one or more boot-critical drivers. To install Windows, make sure that the drivers are valid, and restart the installation” message. On the USB flash drive, open the $WinPEDriver$ and remove the IntelMEI folder.

Once the flash drive has been created, it should look like this:

The $WinPEDriver$ folder is important because it contains the drivers for Windows to boot successfully from the USB flash drive and the hardware on that Mac.

Boot from the USB Flash drive

To inject the drivers, the Mac must be booted from the USB flash drive.

  1. Insert the USB flash drive into an available USB port on the Mac
  2. Reboot while holding the Option key.
  3. Select EFI volume in the startup selector.

If Windows does not boot from the USB flash drive after showing the Windows logo, you may have to run the following command to tell the firmware to boot the Windows installer from the USB flash drive. This has been observed on the late-2014 Mac Mini but may affect other models as well. To set the variable:

  1. Disable SIP by booting to the recovery partition.
  2. Boot back to macOS and open Terminal. Run the following command and enter the admin password when prompted:

Format Flash Drive For Bootable Mac Os

sudo nvram InstallWindowsUEFI=1

Insert the USB flash drive if it is not inserted, reboot, and select the EFI volume from the startup selector.

Note: the InstallWindowsUEFI variable is cleared at each reboot, so you will need to set it again if you do not select the USB Flash Drive.

Command Prompt and Mapped Drives

When Windows 10 starts up, it will prompt for installation of Windows 10. To open a DOS window, press fn-Shift-F10 (or just shift-F10) or click Repair Computer->Troubleshoot->Command Prompt (if available).

Format Flash Drive Mac Fat32

Once in the command prompt, there are usually 3 drive letters available: X, C, and D.

  • X: This is Windows that you are booted into in memory. The files from the boot.wim on the flash drive are copied to memory and then booted to
  • C: Boot Camp partition
  • D: The USB Flash drive

Running Utilities

Within the Windows command prompt, you can run utilities on the Boot Camp partition.

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