Now that you have the thing in your drive, don't proceed with the upgrade.ĭo not proceed! You can quit the installer, if you want: When it's all on your machine, the installer will automatically kick in. This is the part you'll wait for the download to complete: They'll keep track of who downloaded and what. Your Apple ID credentials are required for this free package. An alternate is to click the App Store link:īoth options land you on the App Store main screen showing you something like this:Ĭlick the image saying Free Upgrade (free as in beer): In your Apple menu (the top left apple-shaped thing at every program's menu), go for Software Update. You can even skip couple of things during the process as you don't have to reformat the stick. If you happen to have a ready-made stick for any previous OS X version, that obviously can be loaded with new installer. They are incompatible at their current state for USB-booting a Mac. That's my experience of getting new ones.

So, if you just bought an USB-stick, the chances are, that it is MBR-partitioned FAT32. Note: You should not use a version of Mac OS X that is earlier ('older') than the version your Mac shipped with. Contains an installation of Mac OS X 10.4.5 or later, or Mac OS X 10.5 or later, which is compatible with (or shipped with) the Mac that the USB device is connected to.Has been formatted with a GUID partition type.Intel-based Macs support starting from an external USB storage device's volume that: The knowledge base article HT1948 states: All sticks should boot, but I have encountered some that didn't manage that. You'll need a bootable USB-stick with capacity of 8 GiB or more. I have 3 Macs to update and I don't want to download the huge package on all of them. The amount of downloading needed is easily 6+ GiB. Now that OS X El Capitan or version 11 is out, I'll do a refresh for the USB installation instructions.

How to make a bootable el capitan usb