In addition to macOS, Apple has released macOS high sierra. macOS High Sierra is the successor of macOS sierra. With it’s every release apple updates macOS with new features, new design, better security, more stability and better performance. As you know any of the macOS cannot be officially installed on any non-apple hardware, because of this reason installing macOS on PC was never an easy job. In this article, I will show how to create a bootable USB of macOS high sierra on windows 10.
Step 1. Downloading the required files.
Select the type of disk being used. Note that if you’re using a 8GB (or larger) USB thumb drive, it will be completely erased. DiskMaker will erase any complete volume that you signify, so if you wish to make a disk that can install Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra, consider using Disk Utility (found in the Applications/Utilities folder) to partition the drive into three separate volumes. Since (1) I cannot upgrade my OS to High Sierra without the SSD and (2) I cannot use the SSD without upgrading to High Sierra first and (3) I don’t have any other Mac machine, I tried a workaround that obviously didn’t work thus this post. I created a High Sierra bootable USB installer using TransMac in Windows.
Clean Install macOS High Sierra using a Bootable USB. Sometimes we need a clean installation of our operating system. But doing it the Apple’s way that is online can frustrate us like hell. So what you can do is you can download a full installer, and then you can create a bootable USB. To create macOS High Sierra bootable USB Installer, you need to have a Macbook or iMac but don’t worry because we have covered you. Now you can easily create a bootable USB installer for macOS High Sierra on Windows 10, 8 or 7 using the dmg that we have provided.
Download the macOS high sierra DMG file from this link.
Download Transmac from their official website or you can download it directly from here.
In this tutorial, I am going to use the Transmac software to create the bootable USB drive from windows. Transmac is a paid software, however, it offers 15 days of trial which is enough for you to create the bootable USB.
Step 2. Installing Transmac.
After downloading the setup.exe double-click it to open and follow the procedure displayed in the setup to install.
See also: Beginner’s guide to patching DSDT in Hackintosh.
Step 3. Making the bootable USB drive.
In order to make bootable USB of macOS high Sierra, you will need an 8gb or higher USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 drive.
Note: By using USB 3.0 you might face some issues while booting into the installer, in that case, please try using USB 2.0 drive.
1. Insert the USB drive into your computer and then right click on the transmac app and select “run as administrator”. Running as administrator is required as we will format the USB drive through the transmac app.
2. Now right click on the USB drive you inserted and click “Format for mac”.
Note: This action will format the drive and the data inside the drive will be lost, so before formatting the USB drive, please make sure that the drive you selected is your removable USB drive, not any other drive and also make sure that you backup all the data to a separate drive.
3. After the formatting is done again right click the USB drive and click “Restore with Disk Image”. Click “yes” on the warning about erasing data, then click on the select file button and select the macOS high sierra dmg file that you have downloaded earlier and click OK.
4. Now it’s time to sit back and relax as the process will take time to complete. After the progress bar is finished, your bootable USB of macOS high sierra is ready.
Note: After the USB drive is formatted as mac or the dmg is restored successfully windows will give you an alert to format the drive due to incompatible file-system, but don’t click format otherwise you have to start over again.
See also: How to dual boot MacOS sierra and windows 10 in Hackintosh.
Step 4. Configuring Clover Bootloader.
Clover Bootloader is the key to install macOS on PC. It fakes the macOS installer to think that it is going to install on a real Macintosh. Clover is already included in the above high sierra DMG file and is restored into the USB. However, we need to configure it according to our system’s configuration or importantly graphics configuration.
- First download clover configuration plist files from here as zip.
- Then navigate to EFI/efi/clover/
- Now delete the file named config.plist
- Extract the configuration files zip and select the file which contains your internal graphics card name. i.e: config_HD615_620_630_640_650.plist for Intel HD 630. Then copy it into EFI/efi/clover and rename it as config.plist
Note: The EFI drive is present in the USB drive. So it must be plugged in.
Now the configuration is done and you can proceed towards installation steps.
Step 5. Installing macOS high sierra.
Before we try to boot the macOS installer we need to make some changes to our BIOS settings. Just to spoof the macOS installer so it thinks that we are booting the installer from a real mac, else we will face a disabled boot screen or a message saying “macOS cannot be installed on this device”.
High Sierra Bootable Usb Not Showing Up
1. Reboot your PC and just after you see the manufacturer logo quickly press the “F2” button or press it several times until you see the BIOS menu. To boot into the BIOS settings menu.
2. Change the following settings:-
- SATA mode: AHCI
- CMS support: Enabled
- Secure Boot: Disabled
- Virtualization: Disabled (optional, I haven’t faced any issues keeping it enabled till now but might cause one in some hardware).
- DVMT Pre-allocated: 64 MB or Highest.
DVMT Pre-allocated option is to set the internal GPU memory. Most laptops come with 32mb fixed allocated memory, it causes an error while booting into macOS sierra or Higher versions on Intel skylake or higher architecture CPUs. It is not a common option and might not be available in your BIOS settings. Setting it to 64mb or higher eliminates the need of applying miniStolen patch.
Usb High Sierra Bootable Usb
3. Now after changing the BIOS options, plug in the bootable USB drive and power on the machine.
4. Now again boot into BIOS by tapping “F2”, and open the “boot menu” and select your bootable USB drive from the “Boot drive” menu.
5. If you selected the correct drive in the above step, you should see the clover boot menu. In the clover boot menu select the “Install macOS high sierra” drive and tap “Spacebar” and check “verbose” option and click “Boot with selected option”. Booting verbose will allow you to see if any error occurs while booting.
6. After successfully booting into the installer, select your preferred language and click next and then from the macOS utilities screen select “Disk Utility” and click continue.
7. Here, select the partition in which you want to install macOS. As the partition will be formatted, make sure it is empty. And also make sure the size of the partition is at least 15GB, I prefer to make the partition of size 40Gb or higher so I don’t have to resize it later. Now click on erase and then name the partition as you like, then from the “Format” drop-down menu select “APFS” and click erase.
High Sierra Bootable Usb Windows
8. After formatting the partition, close the disk utility app and select “Install macOS” and click continue. Here you will be asked in which partition you want to install macOS High Sierra, select the partition you formatted in the above step and finally click on install.
Happy Hackintoshing 😉 if you get any trouble please feel free to post them in comments.