In previous tutorial, we wrote a post about creating macOS Catalina bootable USB on Mac, which is a simple tool and there are a couple of free tools to complete the task. You can even use the built-in tool Disk Utility and dd command to do it without installing any third-party apps. However, the situation is much different on Windows 10 because macOS install file (end with .dmg) is not supported by Windows OS. Unlike ISO image, there are few tools on Windows that can handle .dmg files. That's the most challenging part!
So in this article, we will show you how to create macOS bootable USB on Windows 10 and targets macOS Catalina specifically, which is the latest version of Apple macOS and it is easy to download the install file. This will be a great help if there were something wrong with your Mac and a fresh install was demanded. Also if you were a Mac enthusiast and can not afford the price, then it is not a bad choice to build a hackintosh with Catalina.
Before heading to the details of each method, please make sure you have downloaded a copy of Catalina OS dmg file and a working USB drive with more than 12GB storage.
Method 1: Create macOS Catalina Bootable USB on Windows 10 via DMG Editor
- One of the problems with the release of a major operating system update like macOS Catalina is the amount of times it has to be downloaded. As Apple usually intends each Mac or MacBook needing to be updated to download it, the process isn't really efficient enough for instances where many Mac desktops need the upgrade, like in a school or business if there isn't device management or macOS.
- Download and create macOS Catalina USB bootable disk. Download the latest version of the app from dosdude’s portal and mount the dmg file on your Mac. Click continue until you see the window shown in the screenshot. Here you may select an existing copy or macOS Catalina or download one from the Internet.
There are more than one solutions to create macOS Catalina Bootable USB on Windows 10 and we will go with easy one first. DMG Editor, a popular app developed by UUByte, is a multi-functional and cross-platform image burning tool that works on Windows, Linux and macOS. It supports creating bootable USB from popular image files, including dmg, iso, zip, img. And it has full support for Linux distros and old versions of Windows OS. macOS support was not available in previous versions. But now, the latest version of DMG Editor adds better support for macOS dmg file. Let's get a try first.
A macOS Catalina USB install drive is a great tool to have on hand to for quick and easy macOS 10.15 reinstalls. We show you how in this video tutorial. Rereading thread I see you were trying to create a Catalina USB installer in the OP, and that failed, but Big Sur worked. I should have made clear that I have only made Big Sur installers on my M1 MacBook Air. I have never tried to download or make an installer for anything except Big Sur. Apologies if I have misled you.
Step 1.Go to UUByte official website and download Windows version of Etcher from there.
Step 2. Run the executable file and complete the installation process. After that, insert an USB drive in Windows 10.
Step 3. Open the installed UUByte DMG Editor by double-clicking on the icon shown on your home screen. Click on the 'Burn' option then. After that, add Catalina .dmg file to the software and click on 'Change' button to choose the inserted USB device.
Step 4. Finally, click on the 'Burn' button to start the dmg burning process. At this time, a progress bar is displayed on the screen and it gives you an estimated calculation for the time remaining.
Step 5. Wait about 10 minutes. It will show you a pop-up message after completing the task successfully.
The process is very quick and easy to execute. But you might have issues running Etcher app on old computers with low profile hardware. Etcher GUI is built primarily on a new Javascript framework called Electron , which consumes a lot of computing resources. So if you were going to use Etcher to create macOS Catalina bootable USB, make sure testing it on a high-profile Windows 10 PC or laptop.
Method 2: Convert .dmg to .iso and Create macOS Catalina Bootable USB
macOS Catalina install image is distributed in .dmg format and Windows 10 has no support. Hen it is almost impossible to read such files in conventional ways. So in this part, we will convert macOS Catalina dmg file into ISO and create a bootable installer by burning the ISO file to USB. This can be done with the help of third-party software.
To execute the method, you need two software. First, you need a special software to convert dmg to ISO. Second, an ISO to USB burning software to make bootable USB from ISO file. To demonstrate, we have used 7 PowerISO & UUByte ISO Editor to create macOS Catalina bootable USB from Windows 10.
Step 1: Download and install PowerISO on Windows 10.
Step 2: Insert your USB drive. Right-click on this peripheral device and choose the option to format it. After a few seconds, you will get the notification of completing the format process.
Step 3: Now, open PowerISO and navigate to Tool menu. From the pop-up list, please click the 'Convert' option.
Step 4: In a pop-up window, click the folder icon to add macOS Catalina dmg file in Source file field. And set an output file name under Destination file section. Next. choose Standard ISO Images (.ISO) from Output image file format.
Step 5: When the ISO file is created successfully. Download and install UUByte ISO Editor. Then click Burn button to open ISO burning Window. Next, add ISO file to the program and select the USB name. Wait for 7 minutes, and a bootable USB is ready!
Step 6: After getting a task completion message on screen, eject the USB and then start installing macOS Catalina from the USB drive.
The solution is simple but may need to purchase a couple of tools for executing the steps. But if you will search smartly on the internet, chances are there that you can get the required tools without paying any cost. However, if you want to bypass using any of the third-party tools, you can create the Catalina OS bootable USB by accessing macOS in a virtual machine.
Macos Catalina Usb Creator Free
Method 3: Use TransMac to Create macOS Catalina Bootable USB in Windows 10
TransMac is a single-purpose utility to open Mac disk image from a Windows PC. It's one of the quickest methods to create macOS bootable USB drive from dmg file. However, the support for Catalina is not good as Mojave and High Serrira. Plus, you have to pay for 59 USD to use the burn feature. That's why we mention this app at the end of this post.
Step 1: Download TransMac from the official site and run the .exe file to complete the installation process.
How To Create A Bootable Usb For Macos Catalina
Step 2: Now plug in a USB device into the port. Now right-click on TransMac icon shown on the home screen and then choose to Run as administrator.
Step 3: After landing inside the tool's window, all disk drives will be displayed on the left side automatically. Click File -> Open Disk Image to load macOS Catalina dmf file into the program.
Step 4: Before proceeding further, you need to format your USB device to make it compatible with Mac HFS or APS partition. For doing the same, click on the 'Format Diks for Mac' option. Wait for 30 seconds to complete the process.
Step 5: Right-click on the selected USB disk. From the shown list, click on 'Restore with Disk Image'. If it shows any warning message, just click on the OK button to accept.
Step 6: After that, select the location of saved Mac OS Catalina DMG file and then click on the OK button. Now stay back and look after 20 minutes. You will get ready with a bootable Catalina USB.
TransMac is one of the easiest method to create a bootable macOS Installer USB on a Windows PC. You can use this application to burn any version of macOS operating system file to USB.
Conclusion
To conclude, we would recommend going with either the first or the second method to create bootable macOS Catalina USB. Both are super easy to follow because you don't need to install multiple tools and go through a multi-layer process to meet your requirement.
«12»Macos Catalina Usb Creator Software
Comments
Os X Catalina Usb Creator
- edited October 2019
- Upgraded 2 of my 3 macs on Catalina. No problems. My final machine (iMac) will have to wait as one piece of crucial software (from Hikvision) is still 32-bit and who knows when these clowns will make it 64-bit.
i did an upgrade, then a clean-install to see what bugs have been put in. So far, all solid. - The easiest/best way to do this is to use Install Disk Creator.
Which has not been updated since Dec 2018The easiest/best way to do this is to use Install Disk Creator.
Yes, DiskMaker X is ready for Catalina but it’s in beta at the moment. According to developers Twitter page, it should be ready by the end of this week hopefully.DiskMaker X is now Catalina ready.- Catalina is the buggiest system I ever loaded on a computer. Small but annoying problem; Can't update Apps, can't download Apps, changes Mail.
- The 'quoted' command is incorrect. Wrong: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia—volume /Volumes/USBdrive —/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« Correct: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USBdrive --/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« The use of em dashes instead of two hyphen-minus characters will result in the command not working, as does the omission of the space between 'createinstallmedia' and the first two hyphen-minus characters.
- edited October 2019
Nope. It works fine. You can see it works in the attached screenshots.The 'quoted' command is incorrect. Wrong: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia—volume /Volumes/USBdrive —/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« Correct: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USBdrive --/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« The use of em dashes instead of two hyphen-minus characters will result in the command not working, as does the omission of the space between 'createinstallmedia' and the first two hyphen-minus characters.
I appreciate what you're saying and why. - Copied and Pasted...Didn't work. Manually type worked. Strange...
- I encountered a few problems doing a Catalina upgrade:
1) The Catalina post-installation got stuck forever (hot spin), or at least overnight for > 12 hours, at the 'Setting Up Your Mac,' phase on my 2013 MacBook Pro. I DuckDuckGo'd the symptom and found that several other people are having the same exact problem on a variety of Macs. The workaround, which I consider very dangerous, is to do a hard reboot of your Mac. It seemed to work but anytime you interrupt something having to do with installation and setup you run the risk that something isn't configured quite right.
2) The MobileMe AppleID Curse came back once again to haunt me. I'm a former MobileMe subscriber (sad, I know) who also had an AppleID for iTunes purchases. When iCloud came along my MobileMe credentials were converted to iCloud credentials as an AppleID. However, I also had the iTunes AppleID but despite an initial promise from Apple to merge these two IDs, Apple subsequently refused, and still refuses to merge my two Apple IDs. Getting the US nuclear launch codes requires a lower level of authority than what it takes to merge Apple IDs. Not a joke. Anyway, once Catalina started doing its thing to associate my AppleID with various services on my Mac it defaulted to using my ex-MobileMe AppleID - for everything. The problem is that most of my purchases, like thousands of music tracks, apps, books, iTunes in the Cloud, etc., are associated with my ex-iTunes AppleID. Sounds like an easy switch, but nope, I ended up having to reassign everything manually and re-download a boatload of content.
3) I could not enable Keychain. No matter how many times I entered my credentials it still refused to activate. The 'solution' was to log out of my ex-MobileMe AppleID account, which is associated with my iCloud subscriptions like cloud storage and log back in. To do this I had to first manually disconnect from every service shown under AppleID in preferences. This temporarily severed things like Photos, Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Safari history, Keychain, Find My Mac, Notes, etc. Once I shut everything down (and I selected the Save option on whether to keep iCloud content on my Mac) I was able to sign back into my ex-MobileMe AppleID and activate Keychain. The OS then asked me, one by one, whether to reconnect each of the services to iCloud, which I did. However, a side effect of this is that Photos now thinks, as it always does if you sign out and sign back into iCloud, that all of my roughly 32,000 photos must be uploaded to iCloud. It's now been churning away for a couple of days even though everything in my iCloud matches what is on my Mac. I think it stupidly uploads the whole photo, then realizes it's already on the server and discards it. Talk about a massive waste of bandwidth. (Sidenote: Amazon Photos does the same thing). It seems to me that they could do something like a checksum or CRC based comparison/handshake, at least as a first pass, before uploading the entire photo.
Anyway, definitely not what I'd called a 'bumpless' upgrade. Not to sound damning, but installation issues always set a bad tone for a product. Apple could have and should have rooted out these problems ahead of time. To them this may sound like a toe stub, but to end users, it is a royal pain in areas far north of their toe. - Copy & Paste of.. 'sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia—volume /Volumes/USBdrive —/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app' does not work for me. It says Command not found.
Copy & Paste of either of those did not work for me but this did....
Nope. It works fine. You can see it works in the attached screenshots.The 'quoted' command is incorrect. Wrong: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia—volume /Volumes/USBdrive —/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« Correct: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USBdrive --/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« The use of em dashes instead of two hyphen-minus characters will result in the command not working, as does the omission of the space between 'createinstallmedia' and the first two hyphen-minus characters.
I appreciate what you're saying and why.
sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled
Me too ↑
Copy & Paste of either of those did not work for me but this did....
Nope. It works fine. You can see it works in the attached screenshots.The 'quoted' command is incorrect. Wrong: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia—volume /Volumes/USBdrive —/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« Correct: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USBdrive --/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« The use of em dashes instead of two hyphen-minus characters will result in the command not working, as does the omission of the space between 'createinstallmedia' and the first two hyphen-minus characters.
I appreciate what you're saying and why.
sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled
We'll look into it again, but as presented, the original absolutely works in two different AI locations.
Me too ↑
Copy & Paste of either of those did not work for me but this did....
Nope. It works fine. You can see it works in the attached screenshots.The 'quoted' command is incorrect. Wrong: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia—volume /Volumes/USBdrive —/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« Correct: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USBdrive --/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« The use of em dashes instead of two hyphen-minus characters will result in the command not working, as does the omission of the space between 'createinstallmedia' and the first two hyphen-minus characters.
I appreciate what you're saying and why.
sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled- I'd suggest the instructions say 'name the USB stick USBDrive' from the get-go. After decades in this business, I have lost count of the times that people miss such a basic instruction as 'Make sure to change the element titled 'USBdrive' for the name of the drive you intend to become the bootable installer. '
We’ve been seeing these kinds of comments for over twenty years with each release of a major upgrade to macOS. Someone always declares something to be the worst, buggiest, most stupid update ever. Point being someone is always going to have problems no matter what. So no, Catalina is not the buggiest system ever loaded onto a computer and someone will be along shortly to tell you what their buggiest system ever loaded onto a computer was. It’s like death and taxes.Catalina is the buggiest system I ever loaded on a computer. Small but annoying problem; Can't update Apps, can't download Apps, changes Mail.- The copy-and-paste problem seems to be caused by a font translation issue from the web page to Terminal.
The double dashes are coming out as single in Terminal with the error 'command not found'.
Replacing the single dashes with doubles results in the error 'invalid option --?'
Removing the second set of dashes finally worked for me:
... --volume /Volumes/USBdrive /Applications ...
This ^ is kind of a mess. Is that deliberate? If you're trying to edify, sorting that in a clearer manner would be a big help.The 'quoted' command is incorrect. Wrong: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia—volume /Volumes/USBdrive —/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« Correct: »sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USBdrive --/Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app« The use of em dashes instead of two hyphen-minus characters will result in the command not working, as does the omission of the space between 'createinstallmedia' and the first two hyphen-minus characters.