Sierra on a thumb drive?

[DaveWT]

I could have sworn I have accomplished this with past versions of OS X. I thought I even had documentation stored away that told me how to do it...

What I would like to have is a basic Sierra installation on a USB thumb drive, such as I could restart my Mac and come up fully booted into Sierra from the thumb drive.

There are tons of documents out there that tell you how to put the Sierra installer on a thumb drive and I have done that but I do not really want to reinstall Sierra on my iMac from the thumb drive, which would be the result. I want to just boot up from the thumb drive itself.

Have I imagined I have accomplished this in the past? Do I have too much time on my hands? Should I work on another hobby instead?

 

[chas_m]

I haven't tried it with Sierra myself, but unless the procedure has changed dramatically, it's a simple matter of re-downloading the Sierra installer, inserting the thumb drive, and directing the installer to install on the thumb drive. Obviously, you'll want to thumb drive of at least 8 GB if not more.

 

[DaveWT]

Thanks Chas,

I think I was overthinking this and expecting to need some more exotic method.

So today I started with an 8 GB thumb drive (yes really erased so I had the full drive available.) When I tried to install Sierra, the installer told me the drive didn't have enough room.

So I grabbed a fully erased 16 GB thumb drive and again, the installer told me it didn't have enough room.

Finally I grabbed a fully erased 32 GB thumb drive and this time the installer worked. (Boy did that take a long time!). When it had finished and I did the minimal setup there was just over 9 GB on the drive so the 16 GB drives should have been big enough but perhaps it needs some extra during the installation process making that one just too small.

Now that I have done it, I am not sure what use it is, other than an interesting exercise. If my iMac's system ever got corrupted I would boot from my full clone external disk drive rather than this slow thing but it was a fun exercise.

One benefit of this exercise. My iMac has my own desktop image on it and when I did the update from El Capitan to Sierra, it retained that image of course. So booting form the new basic Sierra thumb drive gave me my first look at the beautiful default Sierra desktop image. Wonderful isn't it!