Apple hasn’t shipped operating systems on physical media in a full decade, but there are still good reasons to want a reliable old USB stick for macOS Catalina. Luckily, it's not hard to make one—either with a handy graphical user interface or some light Terminal use. Here's what you need to get started:

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• A Mac that you have administrator access to. We've created a USB stick from both Mojave and Catalina, but your experience with other versions may vary.
• A 16GB or larger USB flash drive or a 16GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. A USB 3.0 drive will make things significantly faster, but an older USB 2.0 drive will work in a pinch; 8GB drives worked for Mojave and older versions of macOS, but the Catalina installer is just a little too large to fit.
• The macOS 10.15 Catalina installer from the Mac App Store (in High Sierra or older macOS versions) or the Software Update preference pane in Mojave. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary.
• If you want a GUI, take a look at Ben Slaney's Install Disk Creator from MacDaddy. There are other apps out there that do this, but this one is quick and simple.

If you want to use this USB installer with newer Macs as they are released, you'll want to periodically re-download new Catalina installers and make new install drives. Apple rolls support for newer hardware into new macOS point releases as they come out, so this will help keep your install drive as universal and versatile as possible.

Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled),” or your preferred format type. The former option can help ensure that the USB drive is made fully compatible with your Mac, since most USB drives are preformatted for Windows computers by default. 8 Type a name for the USB drive in the “Name” field. It offers a tool “Disk Manager”. It can help Mac users securely and quickly format USB flash drive under Mac OS. Very easy to use and 100% safe. The top 5 USB flash drive formatting software for Mac can help us easily and securely format USB flash drive under Mac OS. Just select one of them to format USB flash drive under Mac OS.

There's also one new consideration for newer Macs with Apple's T2 controller chip—as of this writing, that list includes the iMac Pro, the 2018 Mac Mini, the 2018 MacBook Air, and 2018 and 2019 MacBook Pros, though Apple keeps an updated list here. Among this chip's many security features is one that disallows booting from external drives by default. To re-enable this feature, hold down Command-R while your Mac reboots to go into Recovery Mode and use the Startup Security Utility to 'allow booting from external media.' If you're trying to install an older version of macOS, you may also need to go from Full Security to Medium Security to enable booting, but if you're just trying to install the current version of macOS, the Full Security option should be just fine. And if you're just doing an upgrade install rather than a clean install, you can run the Catalina installer from the USB drive from within your current installation of macOS, no advanced tweaking required.

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The easy way

Once you've obtained all of the necessary materials, connect the USB drive to your Mac and launch the Install Disk Creator. This app is basically just a GUI wrapper for the terminal command, so it should be possible to make install disks for versions of macOS going all the way back to Lion. In any case, it will work just fine for our purposes.

Install Disk Creator will automatically detect macOS installers on your drive and suggest one for you, displaying its icon along with its path. You can navigate to a different installer if you want, and you can also pick from all the storage devices and volumes currently connected to your Mac through the drop-down menu at the top of the window. Once you're ready to go, click 'Create Installer' and wait. A progress bar across the bottom of the app will tell you how far you have to go, and a pop-up notification will let you know when the process is done. This should only take a few minutes on a USB 3.0 flash drive in a modern Mac, though using USB 2.0 will slow things down.

The only slightly less-easy way

The Install Disk Creator is just a wrapper for the terminal command to create macOS install disks, so if you’re comfortable formatting your USB drive yourself and opening a Terminal window, it’s almost as easy to do it this way. Assuming that you have the macOS Catalina installer in your Applications folder and you have a Mac OS Extended (Journaled)-formatted USB drive (which is to say, HFS+ and notAPFS) named 'Untitled' mounted on the system, you can create a Catalina install drive using the following command.

sudo /Applications/Install macOS Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled

The command will erase the disk and copy the install files over. Give it some time, and your volume will soon be loaded up with not just the macOS installer but also an external recovery partition that may come in handy if your hard drive dies and you're away from an Internet connection. If you would like to create an install drive for a macOS version other than Catalina, just tweak the paths above to refer to Mojave or High Sierra instead.

Whichever method you use, you should be able to boot from your new USB drive either by changing the default Startup Disk in System Preferences or by holding down the Option key at boot and selecting the drive. Once booted, you'll be able to install or upgrade Catalina as you normally would. You can also use Safari, Disk Utility, or Time Machine from the recovery partition to restore backups or troubleshoot.

Most new PCs don't come with DVD drives anymore. So it can be a pain to install Windows on a new computer.

Luckily, Microsoft makes a tool that you can use to install Windows from a USB storage drive (or 'thumbdrive' as they are often called).

But what if you don't have a second PC for setting up that USB storage drive in the first place?

In this tutorial we'll show you how you can set this up from a Mac.

You can download the ISO file straight from Windows. That's right - everything we're going to do here is 100% legal and sanctioned by Microsoft.

If you want an English-language version of the latest update of Windows 10, you can download the ISO here.

If you have a relatively new computer, you probably want the 64-bit version. If you're not sure, go with the 32-bit version to be safe.

If you want a non-English-language version of Windows, or want to get an older update version, download the ISO here instead.

The ISO file is only about 5 gigabytes, but I recommend you use a USB drive with at least 16 gigabytes of space just in case Windows needs more space during the installation process.

I bought a 32 gigabyte USB drive at Walmart for only $3, so this shouldn't be very expensive.

Stick your USB drive into your Mac. Then open your terminal. You can do this using MacOS Spotlight by pressing both the ⌘ and Space bar at the same time, then typing 'terminal' and hitting enter.

Don't be intimidated by the command line interface. I'm going to tell you exactly which commands to enter.

Open Mac Spotlight using the ⌘ + space keyboard shortcut. Then type the word 'terminal' and select Terminal from the dropdown list.

Paste the following command into your terminal and hit enter:

diskutil list

You will see output like this (note - your Mac's terminal may be black text on a white background if you haven't customized it).

Copy the text I point to here. It will probably be something like

/dev/disk2.

Next format your USB drive to Windows FAT32 format. This is a format that Windows 10 will recognize.

Note that you should replace the disk2 with the name of the your drive from step 3 if it wasn't disk2. (It may be disk3 or disk4).

Run this command using the correct disk number for your USB:

diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS 'WIN10' GPT /dev/disk2

Then you'll see terminal output like this.

This will probably only take about 20 seconds on a newer computer, but may take longer on an older computer.

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Note that for some hardware, you may instead need to run this command, which uses the MBR format for partitioning instead of GPT. Come back and try this command if step 7 fails, then redo steps 5, 6, and 7:

Now we're going to prep our downloaded ISO file so we can copy it over to our USB drive.

You will need to check where your downloaded Windows 10 ISO file is and use that. But your file is probably located in your ~/Downloads folder with a name of Win10_1903_V1_English_x64.iso.

hdiutil mount ~/Downloads/Win10_1903_V1_English_x64.iso

Update April 2020: One of the files in the Windows 10 ISO – install.wim – is now too large to copy over to a FAT-32 formatted USB drive. So I'll show you how to copy it over separately.

Thank you to @alexlubbock for coming up with this workaround.

First run this command to copy over everything but that file:

rsync -vha --exclude=sources/install.wim /Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-US_DV9/* /Volumes/WIN10

Then run this command to install Homebrew (if you don't have it installed on your Mac yet):

/usr/bin/ruby -e '$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)'

Then use Homebrew to install a tool called wimlib with this terminal command:

brew install wimlib

Then go ahead and create the directory that you're going to write the files into:

mkdir /Volumes/WIN10/sources

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Then run this command. Note that this process may take several hours, you may see 0% progress until it finishes. Don't abort it. It will use wimlib to split the install.wim file into 2 files less than 4 GB each (I use 3.8 GB in the following command), then copy them over to your USB:

wimlib-imagex split /Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-US_DV9/sources/install.wim /Volumes/WIN10/sources/install.swm 3800

Once that's done, you can eject your USB from your Mac inside Finder.

Congratulations - your computer now should boot directly from your USB drive. If it doesn't, you may need to check your new PC's BIOS and change the boot order to boot from your USB drive.

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Windows will pop up a screen and start the installation process.

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Enjoy your new PC, and your newly-installed copy of Windows.