My MBA 2012 with OS X 10.9.4 Mavericks won't boot anymore - it simply freezes after the initial jingle. I already tried resetting NVRAM and SMC, but to no avail. I don't have any time machine backups. However, I still have a disc image of Mavericks sitting on an external hard drive, a USB stick and access to a notebook with Windows 7.
I haven't yet found any tutorial on how to create a bootable USB drive on Windows in order to reinstall OS X on my beloved Macbook Air. Any help would be greatly appreciated! According to the first answer here, there's a tool with a free trial called TransMac that can do it. Just make sure the USB drive is formatted with GPT and not MBR.
If your USB thumb drive, USB-based external disk or flash storage contains a usable operating system or an OS X installer, you can select it at boot time using OS X’S built-in feature called Startup Manager, which can be invoked via a simple keystroke. Sep 26, 2018 - Want to make a MacOS Mojave bootable USB installer drive? Remember that creating a bootable MacOS Mojave USB installer drive will.
What might be easier, however, is that that model has support for Internet Recovery. If you boot holding Command-R and you have a WiFi connection, it can actually boot into recovery mode without a recovery partition on a drive (or even without a working drive).
Having said that, your description of a crash right after the boot chime could signify a more serious hardware problem and you may not be able to boot anything. If you boot holding the option key down, the startup disk selection screen should appear. If it crashes anyways, you may be looking at a hardware problem. I know this question is old but it is still valid. I was never able to write a Mac installer image to my Flash Drive and have it bootable, unless I did it on a Mac. Using Michael D.
Dryden's, I was able to use the Diskpart command to clean and prep a GPT partition on a flash drive for an OSX Mavericks install image. I used TransMac on Windows 7 to restore the image file I had to the Flash Drive, it created a bootable Mac image on my flash drive. Someone had reported that the method for using DISKPART did not work, but I have done this twice and it works remarkably well, and it's the only method I could find to create a Mac-Bootable Flash.
I've been trying to post this to confirm that it works for some time, I just hope it helps someone else, because it is a very easy solution. Here are the Diskpart commands used to prep the Flash Drive, just to have them here in case my Link does not work: diskpart DISKPART list disk (Find the disk number) DISKPART select disk x (from result of List Disk) Disk x is now the selected disk. DISKPART clean DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.
DISKPART convert gpt DiskPart successfully converted the selected disk to GPT format. DISKPART create partition primary Note: I use 'Rufus' for all other USB writing and formatting for Windows systems, it's a great app, but I had previously tried to format the drive as GPT using that, as a Fat32 partition. When I tried to inject the image, Transmac told me that the drive was 'write protected'. So basically, the USB drive cannot have any high level formatting, the Windows system should detect the drive as 'not formatted' for this to work, which it will if prepped right with Diskpart. I had this problem with a friend computer, it was an old iMac and I'll tell you it is not going to be easy. The first thing you have to do is make sure what model you have (the year when your computer has been released) then check on the official apple website to see what is the latest macOS or Mac OS X version available for you computer.
In most of the new mac computer, you can just press cmd+r while booting and the mac will automatically download everything you need to install the system, but the oldest does not have this tool. In this case, you have to download the dmg file, that can be found on the web, for example, one websites that provides some macOS and Mac OS X is (for El Capitan, if you need another version, I'm sorry but you have to search for it). Here things start to get a little tricky. First of all you have to flash the image on a USB drive, I recommend etcher, that works on everything (Mac, Linux and Windows too) it's extremely easy to use and you just need to select the drive and the image and etcher will do everything by itself, plus it's free.
When the USB drive is ready you can plug it in you mac and press alt (option) while booting, you have inserted a firmware password, it will ask you to unlock the firmware by inserting that password, else it will take you to all the bootable drives, including your USB device. If you see the mac logo with a stop icon over it, it means that you downloaded a too new version that is not supported from your mac, else it will start. When it start, it won't install, saying that the system can't verify the downloaded image, that's why you have to navigate on the 'utilities' menu on the top bar and open the terminal. Now you have to choices, change the date & time, which can work, but may not. That's basically because every image of mac has a certificate that can expire, so, if the certificate is expired you won't be able to make it work, unless you change the date (the date is different from mac version to mac version, so based on that you have to change it, usually just search for when was that version released and se the current date to that date or even one or two days later to make it work). Then try to install the system, if this does not work again, you can start the installation without verifying the image, but you should really trust the image you're using from being corrupted or modified (just to make sure the download went right, use the SHA-1 code to make the file has been downloaded right).
So, to proceed without verifying the image, from terminal, type in this command: sudo defaults write com.apple.frameworks.diskimages skip-verify true then, start the installation. (Is possible that you won't need the sudo at the begin, in that case just remove it from the command and start from 'defaults') Now you should be able to install macOS from a USB drive. Just a little thing, make sure to have formatted the disk before proceeding, I would recommend to make a partition that takes the whole disk in mac Journaled format, then if you want you will be able to encrypt the disk (the installer will ask you to do that later), instead, if the disk was encrypted before, you will have to insert the encryption key of the disk to continue the installation process.
Really hope this help, I spent a lot of hours to do this on a really old iMac from 2008. And not it works!
I had a guy bring me in an old Mac Book Pro that had a corrupted hard drive. I saved his Data but then realized his computer was so old that I was going to have trouble getting a copy of OSX installed. His computer was no longer supported on current OSX releases. To make things worse his DVD drive wouldn't read a install disk. So this post is the result of me finding a way to resurrect an old Mac Book Pro. I hope it will help someone else in a similar situation. Note: Before starting this tutorial, ensure that you have a USB drive with at least 8GB of storage as well as a Leopard, or Snow Leopard retail DVD or disk image.
Grey DVDs that were included with a Mac at the time of purchase cannot be used to make USB boot drives as they do not include drivers for Macs other than the computer it was shipped with. In this tutorial I will be creating a Snow Leopard USB install disk.
The steps are the same to create one for Leopard. Format the USB drive.
Click the Partition tab. Under the Partition Layout header click on the 1 Partition option in the drop-down menu.
Click the Format drop-down menu and select Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Bear in mind that this will erase all data from the USB drive, so backup any important files before proceeding. To format the USB drive drive, click the Apply button in the lower right-hand corner of the Disk Utility window. Snow Leopard, DVD or Disk Image. Locate a Snow Leopard disk image or DVD on the Mac. If you're using a disk image, mount it to the desktop.
In the Disk Utility window, click the Restore tab in the USB drive's menu. In the center of the window you'll see two boxes: one labeled Source and another Destination. Drag-and-drop the USB drive's partition into the Destination box. Drag-and-drop the Mac OS X Install Drive disk into the Source box.
At the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and click the Restore button Disk Utility will restore the OS X Install DVD or disk image to the USB drive; this process may take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour depending on how quick the Mac is. Using The Snow Leopard USB Drive Now that you've created a Snow Leopard USB drive, let's use it to install OS X Snow Leopard as well as access Terminal, Disk Utility, and other OS X utilities. Power down the Mac and reboot while holding the Option key. Select the OS X Install DVD from the boot menu using the arrow keys on the Mac's keyboard. Select the language you'd like to use when prompted Installing OS X Snow Leopard To install OS X Snow Leopard from the USB drive, you'll need to reformat the Mac's hard drive. To do this, look towards the top of the screen and click on Utilities from the top menu and then click Disk Utility from the drop-down menu.
Formatting The Mac's Hard Drive. Click on the Mac's hard drive name. Click the Erase tab. Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the Format drop-down menu. Name the drive whatever you'd like Please note that all data on the Mac's hard drive will be erased, so backup all important files before proceeding.
Press the Erase button to format the Mac's hard drive Starting The Snow Leopard Installer. Quit Disk Utility by pressing Command-Q on the keyboard. Press the Continue button.
From the center of the window, select the Mac's hard drive. Press the Install button OS X Snow Leopard may take a bit of time to install depending on the Mac's hardware. Upon completion, the Mac will restart and prompt you to create an account. Disk Utilities on the Snow Leopard USB Drive Additionally, you can access Disk Utility, Terminal, Safari (to access Apple help articles. Not general browsing) and other Mac utilities from the Snow Leopard USB drive. Boot the Mac to the USB drive using the steps shown above and click on the Utilities button from the top bar.
You can access all available utilities from this drop-down menu. It's nice to have these utilities available to use from the USB drive, especially Disk Utility. For example, if you believe your hard drive has died or is corrupted, you can boot your Mac from the USB drive and use Disk Utility to check the the hard drive's SMART status and repair said drive. OS X Snow Leopard USB Drive, Completed In this tutorial, I've shown you how to create a bootable OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard USB drive. You can now use the USB drive to upgrade, maintain and restore Macs to OS X 10.6.