As long as the Mac you’re working on can run Mavericks you can boot into it from your USB drive. Having a copy of OS X on a portable USB drive is a great way to troubleshoot not only your Mac but that of your friends and family as well. You may be wondering why you would want to install OS X to a portable drive when the internal drive is usually larger, faster, and well, internal. A Recovery System will likely not be created, but if you need to reinstall or repair your boot drive at a later date, you can connect the external drive you just prepared and hold Command-R while restarting computer in order to boot from the external Recovery System.You may not know this, but you can install OS X Mavericks to just about any USB drive out there that has enough free space for the operating system. When installation to your external device is complete, you can re-run Install macOS Mavericks installer and upgrade the boot drive of your computer. Be sure you install Mavericks on the external storage device you’ve connected for this purpose, not your computer’s boot drive. The installer should be in the /Applications folder.įollow the onscreen instructions to complete the OS X installation. Launch the Install OS X Mavericks installer you downloaded from Mac App Store. Once the download completes, it will be called, “Install OS 10 Mavericks”.

This may take a while since it is 5.29GB. Since this is a free download you can click download. In the search window type “OS X 10 Mavericks”. To re-download the installer on a computer running Mavericks, go to the Mac App Store.

If you upgraded your Mac to OS X 10.9, your installer may have been removed after your successful first login to OS X Mavericks.

Once your drive is formatted advance to the next section to install Mavericks. You can use Drive Genius 3 Initialize tool and this “How to Guide” to prepare your drive for a new macOS installation or Disk Utility. Preparing your destination drive for Mavericks*Īttach a USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt storage device to your computer, or insert an SDHC or SDXC card into the SD card slot if your Mac has one. You should back up any important files that are on the device to a different drive before continuing. Important: Proceed with caution these steps will erase the storage device.

Mac os mavericks usb bootable