Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks Create a Boot Stick

It is totally different in mavericks.

I won’t bore you with the tortuous details of the change starting with DP1 (involving manipulating invisible files and other such shenanigans) . But one consequence of that was that apple then made a new createinstallmedia executable file made for precisely this purpose in DP4 without such shenanigans.

The method for the GM is very similar to DP4, but with slightly different file names:

After formatting an 8GB USB as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and making sure it’s set to apple guid partition map and naming it Untitled, run this in terminal:

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app --nointeraction

Be patient. It takes quite a while to complete.

But once it does, you can boot up from it by holding the option key down whilst booting.

However I have had problems booting VMware an real macs from the boot sticks made this way.

I have used the script from VMWare that makes a DMG and this has work perfectly.

Try this $1 is the Mavericks Installer app and $2 is the complete path to the output DMG

Create Mavericks Installer.sh