I utilize a 15-inch, Late 2011 model Macbook Pro. It has a 2.4GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 8GB RAM. It isnât the latest and greatest available model. No Retina display, but still quite functional. It has been good to me, so I wanted to spruce it up a bit and be able to continue utilizing it as long as I can.
Rather than do an in-place upgrade, I wanted to start fresh and do a new install. I was running Mac OS X Lion (10.7.x) up until just recently. Considering that OS X Yosemite has been out for a little while now, I figured it was time to get updated. To resurrect a little more life out of my Macbook in the process, I wanted to replace the existing SATA hard drive with a faster SSD drive. Thus, my plan was to:
2. Replace the existing SATA drive with a faster Solid State Drive (SSD).
3. Do a fresh installation of OS X Yosemite on the new SSD drive.
In order to succeed with step #3, I would need a bootable USB drive with the OS X Yosemite installer, since I intend to put the new SSD drive in, format it appropriately as a Mac OS Journaled drive…thus, then having a blank / ready drive for which to perform the clean OS X Yosemite installation onto.
Thus, the first step was to download the OS X Yosemite Installer from the App Store. The installer once downloaded lives in the Applications folder. Thus, letâs find it:
- Open a Terminal window.
- The OS X download will be in your Applications folder. DO NOT execute it.
- We are going to create a bootable USB OS X Yosemite installer
– We are going to make sure that our download is where it needs to be: Type in the following command in your Terminal window…
ls âsl /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app
…and you should see your file/download appropriately….
0 drwxr-xr-x  3 root    wheel  102 Oct 20 18:59 Install OS X Yosemite.app
- Next thing to do is grab a USB thumb drive and create the OS X Yosemite bootable installer.
- I have a 16GB Corsair USB âthumbâ drive I formatted for this purpose. The thumb drive is the color blue, so I appropriately named the volume âBLUEBIRDâ.
– From the Terminal window we are going to type in
sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia –volume /Volumes/BLUEBIRD –applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app ânointeraction
- What this does is use the âcreateinstallmediaâ program contained in the OS X Yosemite application download and creates a bootable OS X Yosemite volume on our newly formatted USB drive (i.e., /Volumes/BLUEBIRD).
- In a nutshell, we are using âcreateinstallmediaâ to create a bootable volume on our USB thumb drive. Notice that we specific that the applicationpath is the fully qualified path name to the OS X Yosemite download (i.e., Install OS X Yosemite.app)
- Once that command runs, you should see output like the following:
Erasing Disk: 0%… 10%… 20%…100%…
Copying installer files to disk…
Copy complete.
Making disk bootable…
Copying boot files…
Copy complete.
Done.
- At this point, I now have a bootable USB thumb drive that contains an OS X Yosemite Installer.