Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@coolaj86

coolaj86/Empty Bootable macOS ISOs.md

Last active February 5, 2021 13:50
Show Gist options
  • Save coolaj86/04fd06560a8465a695337eb502f5b0e9 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save coolaj86/04fd06560a8465a695337eb502f5b0e9 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Empty ISOs for creating Bootable MacOS Installers
Raw
Empty Bootable macOS ISOs.md

See https://bootableinstaller.com

Empty Bootable ISO

In order to create a bootable macOS installer or bootable OS X Installer from Windows or Linux you'll need to have an empty ISO file.

These are various sizes of SPUD / Apple Partition Map ISO files created with hdiutil.

macOS verison Suggested Minimum Suggested Maximum
Recovery
(BaseSystem.dmg)		 empty.2100m.img.bz2 empty.7900m.img.bz2
El Capitan empty.7400m.img.bz2 empty.7900m.img.bz2
Catalina empty.8400m.img.bz2 empty.8600m.img.bz2

Usage

  1. Download (by clicking the Raw button on one of the attached image files)
  2. Copy to an appropriate name
  3. bunzip the image to use it
rsync empty.7400m.img.bz2 el-capitan.img.bz2
bunzip2 el-capitan.img.bz2

How to

On OS X they're created like this:

hdiutil create -o empty.8600m -size 8600m -volname 'Install macOS' -layout SPUD -fs HFS+J
mv empty.8600m.dmg empty.8600m.img
bzip2 empty.8600m.img

See also https://gist.github.com/solderjs/22d08c4b582779485e0df11c5d84063a#file-mac-os-hdiutil-create-help-txt

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment