- How to create a macOS
Monterey USB installer disk. Thanks for watching "9to5Mac." Be sure to thumbs up. Click the Subscribe button, and then enable notifications
with the bell icon, so you won't miss any upcoming videos. 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)
