I have a new SSD and battery ready to go into my daughter's 2014 MBP Retina. So, I used Discmaker X to create a bootable USB stick. Before pulling the old drive, I am testing to make sure the bootable drive works. What happens when option-start booting is that after connecting to the internet and selecting the USB drive, it takes about an hour to get to the end of the progress bar and then it just hangs. I've let it sit that way for about 3 hours and I've also tried recreating the bootable drive a couple of times and still get the same problem. No problems booting from the regular SSD. Any ideas what the problem is?

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"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." (1987) -- Carl Sagan

redo it - I've had similar problems... researched like crazy and the fix was always redownloading and do it again.

Also, some thumb drives simply can not make a bootable drive.

you DID format the USB drive properly, yes?

Yep, I tried formatting it myself, and then later allowed Discmaker X to do the erasing and formatting. I'm about at my wit's end with this. One other thing I just thought of is that this is a fairly old USB stick, probably not USB3. I wonder if getting a newer USB3 stick would help.

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"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." (1987) -- Carl Sagan

I’ve always had the best experience just using the Apple instructions:

[support.apple.com]

Quote
MEG
I’ve always had the best experience just using the Apple instructions:

[support.apple.com]

I have never used Diskmaker X in my life. I always use Apple's createinstallmedia.

You have a backup?

You could install the new stick, book from the backup, and copy the backup to the new stick. Slow, but should work!

Quote
anonymouse1
You have a backup?

You could install the new stick, book from the backup, and copy the backup to the new stick. Slow, but should work!

The backup is in Time Machine, which I don't believe is bootable.

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"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." (1987) -- Carl Sagan

btw, I no longer use a thumb drive for this kinda thing. I went and got a 64GB SSD and partitioned it to several drives each with a different mac os installer. It's more reliable it seems.

Davester,

I wouldn't use any of the methods suggested by others in the thread. Download the installer for the OS. Format the USB stick properly. Use the standard installer to install the OS onto the USB stick. After the installation is complete, boot off the stick, create an account and you're done. No special software. No terminal command. Plain ol' installation. Been doing this with no issues at all.

I always allocate at least 32GB per OS installation. In my case, each OS installation is on a single USB stick. After the OS is installed, I copy an installer for the same OS to the stick. That way, I can boot off the stick, wipe a drive and install the OS on it. If I want a single drive for multiple OS partitions, I'd move to a cheap portable SSD with enough capacity to handle several partitions and OS installations.

Robert

I gave up on the USB stick and dug out a USB SSD drive that used an SSD from an earlier MBP that had been upgraded. Erased it, created a bootable drive, it worked fine. I have no idea why the USB stick wouldn't work since I used exactly the same procedure. Perhaps it timed out because the stick was so ridiculously slow.

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"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." (1987) -- Carl Sagan

Also, some thumb drives simply can not make a bootable drive.


This.

There's something about a bit being flipped to make it a removable drive or not.

I had one SanDisk that had this issue, lots of comments in AMZ reviews.

I've always preferred Robert's method of installing the whole OS, which usually includes an installer in the Applications or Utilities folder.

In older versions, it disappeared after one use, so I always made a copy to store elsewhere, including on the drive itself.

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