How to Make a MacOS Sequoia USB Boot Installer Drive
If you’re a Mac user planning on performing a clean install MacOS Sequoia, or you’d like to have a MacOS Sequoia boot drive for troubleshooting reasons, then you’ll find that creating a bootable installer drive for macOS Sequoia is useful to have on hand.
Making bootable install disks is a little technical in that it uses the command line of MacOS, but this walkthrough will be straight forward enough for anyone to follow. When you’re done, you’ll have a Sequoia installer boot disk that you can use for any Sequoia compatible Mac.
And yes this is for creating an installer for MacOS Sequoia 15, if you’re looking to do this for MacOS Tahoe 26 read here instead.
Requirements for Creating a macOS Sequoia Installer
You will need to have the following:
- The Install macOS Sequoia application downloaded on the Mac in the /Applications/ folder (grab the a MacOS Sequoia installer here or use this direct download link for Sequoia 15.7.4)
- A USB flash drive with at least 32GB capacity (this will be erased as it turns into the MacOS Sequoia boot disk)
- An active internet connection
- A Mac compatible with macOS Sequoia
If you’ve got that covered, you’re ready to create the MacOS Sequoia boot drive.
We’re going to assume you have the “Install MacOS Sequoia.app” file into your /Applications directory after successfully downloading Sequoia in the prerequisite step above.
How to Make a MacOS Sequoia USB Boot Installer Drive
Remember that the USB drive will be completely erased during this process.
- Connect the USB drive to the Mac
- Open the Terminal application with Spotlight (Command+Spacebar) or by going to /Applications/Utilities
- Use the following command, changing “MyUSBDrive” at the end to the name of your USB drive:
- Hit return and enter the admin password to execute the command
sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sequoia.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyUSBDrive
It can take a little bit to create the MacOS Sequoia installer drive, but when it’s finished you will see the drive has been named to “Install MacOS Sequoia” and it is ready to be used as a bootable installer for any Mac compatible with MacOS Sequoia.
You can now use this drive to boot a Mac, perform tasks like installing MacOS Sequoia, performing a clean install, restoring from a backup, or troubleshooting issues on a Mac.
Booting from the MacOS Sequoia Installer Drive
Booting from the installer simply involves restarting the Mac while holding the appropriate startup key for Apple Silicon or Intel Macs, then selecting the Install macOS Sequoia disk from the boot menu.
- For Apple Silicon Mac: with the boot drive connected to USB, reboot the Mac and then immediately press and hold the Power button until the startup options screen appears
- For Intel Mac: with the USB boot drive attached, restart the Mac and then immediately press and hold the OPTION key during system startup until you see the options appear
- Select the “Install MacOS Sequoia” boot drive if necessary
Once you’re booted into the Sequoia installer you’re free to work with the tools available for whatever purpose you’d like.
I just upgraded my M4 Mac Mini Thursday, and the process automatically installed Tahoe. I’m SO GLAD I never ran Time Machine after the restore.
You could write a whole article on how to downgrade from Tahoe, from “they moved recovery from cmd r to shut down first, then hold the power button until the Apple logo shows up” as step one. The next big hurdle is you MUST erase the drive before attempting to install Sequoia, or it’ll simply say it can’t be done. It doesn’t tell you that it can’t downgrade, but CAN start fresh. The last hurdle is you CANNOT have run Time Machine while booted into Tahoe. Oh! And last, but certainly not least, 16Gb USB drive doesn’t cut it past Sonoma. I’ve been using the same 16Gb USB stick every time I’ve followed an OSXDaily install tutorial, but had to switch to something larger this last time.
Also – you don’t need an M-chip to “bless” your Mac after updating the SSD-on-a-chip, just OS14. But you cannot do it on an older computer via virtualizing OS14. It’ll seem to work, but just hang forever. So glad I had access to an M1 Mac Mini at my wife’s work :D
I half wonder if they wrote this article because I was trying to find it and kept Googling “site:osxdaily create sequoia installer”. Maybe they noticed all the pings and the lack of the page :D
This is the exact tool I used to downgrade from Tahoe to Sequoia. I made one of these, erased macOS Tahoe drive, installed macOS Sequoia, setup Mac as new, enabled iCloud to restore photos and notes, and manually restored files from a file backup. A lot of effort, hours, just to get a workable operating system again.
Tahoe is really broken, it’s a bad release. macOS Sequoia is superior.