How to make a Bootable MacOS Sonoma Emergency Installer Drive

Most of the time, MacOS works like a charm.  But, like with all things, something could go wrong that wouldn’t allow you to boot into your Mac. This could be several reasons.  But at the time, you just want to get back in to save any valuable data that maybe on the drive.

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Fortunately, Apple allows a user to make a bootable emergency installer drive that would allow someone to reinstall the operating system via a USB drive. Making this drive is somewhat easy to do and could save someone hours of heartache and work.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• A free USB Port that’s directly on the Mac.
• An USB drive (16GB minimum)

Here’s what to do:

1. Download the MacOS Sonoma installer from the Mac App Store.
2. Connect the USB Drive directly to the Mac.
3. Open Disk Utility from [Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility].
4. Over on the right side, select the USB drive.
5. Select Erase.
6. When it’s finished, quit Disk Utility.
7. Go in to Terminal [Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal].
8. Type the following (see fig. A).
9. Hit return to execute the command, and then enter the administrator password as required by sudo, you won’t see the password typed in Terminal so just enter it and hit the Return key
10. The macOS Sonoma beta boot installer drive will be created, you can watch the Terminal for progress, when finished you will see a message in Terminal stating ‘Install media now available at “/Volumes/Install macOS Sonoma beta”‘
11. To safely remove the USB drive, drag the desktop icon to the Trash.
12. Now you can remove the drive.

Fig A.:
sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sonoma.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia –volume /Volumes/Untitled –nointeraction

That’s it.  Good luck!

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Dan Uff

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