Have Your Drive AvailableĮarlier I mentioned that you need a drive of some sort.

Whether you’re running an earlier version of macOS or the latest, click the Download button to place the Catalina installer into the Applications folder of your Mac. If you have already installed Catalina, clicking the “Get” button in the Mac App Store will launch System Preferences > Software Update, and the following dialog appears: Software Update asks you to verify that you want to download a copy of macOS Catalina No problem! It’s available on the Mac App Store. Have you already upgraded your Mac to Catalina? If you have, the installer probably isn’t in your Applicaitons folder. Before you launch DiskMaker X 9, you need to download the macOS Catalina installer. Install DiskMaker X 9 on your Mac by dragging the app icon to the Applications folder alias as shown by the gray arrow on the installer window. Drag the icon to the Applications folder alias as shown. A window similar to the one seen below appears: The DiskMaker X 9 Installer. Once you’ve located the installer, double click it to mount the disk image. By default, it should be in the Downloads folder. To install DiskMaker X 9, locate the installer disk image (.dmg) file. You can also create a single drive with installers for every Mac operating system back to Lion! Install DiskMaker X 9 Note that the developers of the app also have DiskMaker X versions available back to Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”, which is helpful if you wish to load older Macs with their original operating system versions. Download DiskMaker X 9Ĭlick the DiskMaker X link in the first paragraph of this article and download a copy of DiskMaker X 9 to your Mac. With a blank external hard disk or flash drive at your fingertips, follow these instructions. The app is free, but a donation is suggested.

You can always use the Mac Terminal app to create a bootable installation disk, but DiskMaker X automates the process. Diskmaker X has been my tool of choice for making bootable install drives for years, and in this article, I’ll show how to create one for macOS Catalina.

While I was able to reload my MacBook from the bootable backup drive, I know that it’s always good practice to have one drive - a cheap flash or hard drive - that can be booted for one purpose, that of doing a clean install of macOS. My recent experience with water damage to my new 16-inch MacBook Pro reinforced two practices that I’ve followed for many years making a bootable backup and creating a bootable macOS install drive.

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