How to Make a Bootable External Mac Hard Drive

what is that f**** noise you noob

I did this about 6 times with my early 2009 iMac. And I have one on every compatible os from El Capitan all the way down to snow leopard. And I have leopard installed on the internal drive

Thank you for inspiring me :)

Which seagate hard drive is that ??

Great video!! But which portable externals can be made bootable. iI tried it with a seagate one all went well until I got to installing the OS After over an hour of seeing "about 15 minutes" I decided that might not work :)

however when i follow your instructions to the letter i end up with a mounted drive on my desktop but when i try to select the drive through the reboot method it says the ex ssd is locked and i cant install to it.

Will this word on a my passport wd ssd 1tb ?

i dont have a disk utility this is so stressful

Thanks for your tutorial. Would this mean i could clone my mini mac with all installed apps and run on another computer without having to reinstall all the apps? ✌

I created a bootable installer with El Capitan. I use Yosemite.

I would like to use El Capitan as my macintosh hd, how?

Is it safe to use external drive as a startup disk?

hey i have a question what exactly happens when i make a external hard drive bootable ?I will get you use it as storage or what happens?like i can use that drive as my internal storage then?

how do i go back?

What if the recovery mode doesnt show??

How do I do this with macos big sur?

Very short, complete and information -rich presentation. Extremely well presented. Just what I was looking for. No more, no less. Liked and subscribed.

Great video. Thanks. Having booted from external drive, how do I access all my apps and documents? Do I need to transfer stuff or re-install?

Maybe too short and sweet for some of us. I'm kind of a step-by-step guy who needs the 1-2-3s; click this, then this... with words that align with the screen image. I can follow up to the Download and Reinstall image (although I do NOT get the Wilkommen screen), but I hesitate at clicking the Continue button because I don't know if writing over my current laptop or not. He says "choose the external drive" but does show us HOW or WHEN to do that. I don't want to risk reinstalling over my active OS because he left out that part of the demonstration. I'm just asking to see EACH menu choice visually so I can match it (or not) with what I see on my machine. ...Any advice?

Thanks, straight to the point.

Tried using this method to install Mojave onto a 1 TB external drive, using a MacBook, but received an error message indicating "Target disk too small". Repeated the process about three times with the same result. I've seen where they reformat the drive as APFS to circumvent this problem, which was successful. Thoughts?

I was hoping you could go a little faster .... Just a tip for the future

Very useful. Your video safed may macbook... rs

Turn off the annoying music! I'm off to find a different video.

My hard drive just doesn’t show up to instal

I owe you a beer or two. I bought a refurb 2015 MB Pro with Catalina to replace a 2010. Now a lot of my old programs, specifically my Adobe CS5 Suite, can't be run on the new system. I needed an external to run an older OS for when I want to do some graphics work. Every video and article I read for 6 hours got me to the same spot, a Yellow Triangle and Exclamation Point over my external drive saying it could not be loaded on there. Their way worked for them, but what you covered that they didn't was rebooting in Recovery Mode. As soon as I did that, all drives appeared. I was at my wits end, so thank you for saving my sanity.

how can I fully transfer my files and mac's settings and stuff to the new hard drive but also use it as a start up disk

Can you run macOS from an external hard drive on a Windows computer?

How can you make your old HD "unbootable" to avoid the system trying to boot from the old one during restart?

Does it work if your mac has Catalona on it?

If I have a 128 gb flashdrive, would that work? Or does it have to be a HDD or SSD?

Yo help me out when i do the recovery option after i put the apple id and password it says item not available is there a way to do do it with the os discs or something but still with the external hd please help me out id really appreciate it sorry if i the question doesnt make sense

How to install on a partition of a hard disk so that I don't have to erase.?

And what brain dead moron gives this a thumbs down. God I would hate to watch what they think is good.

If you have Tuxera NTFS installed, uninstall it, otherwise your Windows drive won't boot.

It was recommended to me that I should create an external SSD boot-drive because my aging iMac is often as slow as molasses, and it's the internal drive that's more than likely at issue. I now have a 500gb SSD drive with which to have this adventure. My question is this: Will I actually see a difference in how my iMac performs?

I have a early 2008 IMac and the HDD from my old MacBook Pro (died) and the HDD has MS Office on it. I can open MS Office from the HDD and when i tried to RESTORE on the IMAC from a HDD everything looked ok but MSOFFICE 2011 won't open...it finds a install error and fails to open. When I tried to do the OPTION reboot nothing happens on the IMAC...am I missing something? Since I can't find the original install disk, can you tell me how to move MSOFFICE from the HDD without doing a complete install?

I just install snow leopard in my external Hard drive using a macbook, but when I connect the hard drive to my macbook pro it won't boot, it's just a white screen with the logo and nothing happens, you know what could it be?

This is perfect! Exactly what I wanted to know, without too much needless info. Thanks!

Can I boot from this drive on a windows PC?!

How do you make the Mac automatically choose the new HD every time the Mac is restarted (without having to use the Option key on start-up)?

🤔🤨🧐🤩🥳👏🤘🎉🍻

So easy. Thanks so much :-)

High Sierra users: This bit is important! If the GUID Partition Map option dropdown menu isn't even showing, make sure you go to Disk Utility > View > Show All Devices.

This is how the "How To" videos shopuld be made, clear, simple and short.
Many thanks

Does it have to be an external HD or can it just be another Internal HD? Cheers and thanks for posting.

I have two operating systems (snow leopard & El capitan) on my external firewire 800 hd, but when trying to boot from this drive, holding the alt key, none of them appear. They do though appear on the desktop. Also, in system preferences-startup disc, el capitan does not appear.

Thanks for the video! How to move all Applications to the external bootable Drive?

Thank you, I haven’t done this in a long time and I forgot how to do it. Your video was very useful for me. Short and direct. Just perfect!!!

I need to install OSX Sierra on an external drive, so I can then install that drive into my MacBook Pro...I'm all ears...and thanks in advance