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!

Create a macOS Catalina bootable USB drive using this handy guide. The USB drive can be used to upgrade a Mac, clean install macOS or for recovery purposes. If you have more than one Mac you want to upgrade to macOS 10.15 Catalina but don't want to waste so much bandwidth downloading it for each machine, one option is to create a bootable installer on.

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.

After the MacOS Catalina 10.15 USB boot installer drive has been created, it will be mounted on the Mac. At this point it can be used like any other boot disk or installation disk. The MacOS Catalina boot disk can be used with any MacOS Catalina compatible Mac. Make sure the USB drive is connected to the Mac. Next, click on the Apple logo from the top left and choose Restart. When you hear the startup sound or see the Apple logo, immediately press and hold the Option key. Select the bootable installer as the startup disk, and follow the instructions. Find your USB drive on the left-hand column of the TransMac window. Right-click on the USB drive, and click “Format Disk for Mac”. This will delete all of the files on your drive and prepare it for Hackintosh Catalina. Once your USB drive is done formatting, right-click it again and click “Restore with Disk Image”.

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

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.

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!

How To Make A Bootable Usb For Macos Catalina

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.

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.

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.

Apple has just released the latest update to macOS. The update, named macOS Catalina, brings a bucket-full of new features including the ability of using iPad as an external screen for Mac. It also officially kills the 20-year-old iTunes (on Mac) and brings separate apps to manage music and podcasts while also adding a new TV app.

Other notable changes include the abandonment of 32-bit apps in favour of 64-bit apps, refreshed Reminders, Photos, Mail, Safari, and Notes apps, and the introduction of Apple Arcade among others.

Whether you should upgrade your Macs to the new macOS Catalina is entirely up to your current workflow. The change that could affect it the most is the support for 32-bit apps being officially dropped. If you rely on old apps that needs an update for the new platform, you might want to hold your upgrade until these apps are updated or you find alternatives.

With macOS Catalina, Apple has changed the way you used to download the installer. Previously, you would download the new OS installer from AppStore itself and then use that installer to make a bootable installer for later use. In Catalina, when you click the Get button in AppStore, you are taken to the Software Update screen to download the new update.

This change makes is a bit tricky to create a bootable install media like a USB stick or memory card. Albeit not as straightforward as before, but it is definitely possible to make a bootable installer for macOS Catalina. This tutorial shows how to do that.

Update – 12th November, 2020: The latest update to macOS is out now. Learn how to make a bootable macOS Big Sur installer.

Make a Bootable macOS USB Stick or Memory Card

Before you begin:

• Make sure you have a USB stick aka pen drive aka flash drive or memory card aka SD card with at least 16GB of storage.
• Take complete backup of data on your Mac.
• Make sure you have a working, strong, and stable Wi-Fi connection to download macOS Catalina.

Step 1

Due to the way you get your copy of macOS Catalina has changed a bit, we will rely on a third-party app which will help us get the installer. The app we will use for this is called macOS Catalina Patcher which is primarily used to make a patched installer for old Macs that don’t support new versions of macOS.

Download macOS Catalina Patcher, place it under Applications, launch it, and click Continue. Click Download a Copy.

Now, before you move to the next screen, click Options in the menu bar and disable ‘Auto-apply Post Install Patches.’ After that, click Start Download and wait for the download — that is around 8GB — to finish.

Update: I just read other tutorials mentioning that you don’t need macOS Catalina Patcher. You can download macOS Catalina installer from the Software Update screen and it’s placed under Applications. If you wish to go ahead with that method, you can change the path in the Step 3 from Downloads to Applications.

Step 2

Once the download is finished, you can see ‘macOS Catalina Installer” under Downloads folder. Now it’s time to erase your USB stick or memory card.

Insert the medium you wish to use for creating a bootable installer in your Mac and open Disk Utility. Select the medium from the list on left and click Erase. Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) under Format. Type Untitled in Name field (you can choose any name here).

Click Erase and wait for the process to finish. Remember that you are completely erasing the data on this media.

Step 3

Now you are ready to move to the final step which is to create the bootable macOS Catalina media.

Open Terminal and type the following command. Make sure you don’t leave any spaces in-between.

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

Note: Replace Untitled (in bold above) with whichever name you gave in step 2.

If copying and pasting or typing this command doesn’t work, you can do the following.

Type sudo in Terminal and keep the window open. Now open Downloads folder and drag the macOS Catalina Installer file on the Terminal window. It will automatically generate the path where your Catalina installer is located.

Usb Boot Mac Os Catalina

Now, append --volume /Volumes/Untitled at the end of the automatically generated string and press Return key on keyboard. Note that there are two dashes (--) before volume and a space after volume.

Enter your password, press Y and press enter to start the process and let it finish — which will take about 15 minutes.

How to Install macOS Catalina from a Bootable Volume?

Once Terminal finishes the process, you can restart your Mac and when it is booting up, press and hold Option key until you see a black screen with an option to select the startup disk.

Select Install macOS Catalina and click continue. Let the installer load and once it’s finished, you should enter macOS Recovery screen which will ask you to select a user account which you know the password of. Choose your administrator account and enter its password.

Now click Disk Utility and continue. Select the volume where your current macOS is installed. The volume is usually named macOS. Click Erase. Leave the options as default and click Erase again.

After the process finishes, close Disk Utility and you will return to the recovery screen. This time, select Install macOS and continue.

Let the install process finish, which consists of a couple of automatic reboots. Once finished, you should see the initial macOS setup screen. After you are done with this on-boarding step, you will see the desktop and are all set to start using macOS Catalina on your Mac.

Making a Bootable macOS Installer Media: Summing Up

Bootable macOS installer is useful if you want to completely erase your Mac and reinstall the operating system, or if you have more than one Macs and you don’t want to spend time (and bandwidth) downloading the macOS update.

Making a bootable macOS Catalina installer isn’t too complicated. You can make a bootable flash drive aka pen drive aka USB stick or memory card and use it to install the latest macOS version on your Mac.

That’s it, folks. This was a quick tutorial on how to create a bootable macOS Catalina installer on a flash drive or memory card. I hope you found it useful.