“If you do decide to participate in the Yosemite beta program, I recommend creating a bootable installer drive, on an external hard drive or a thumb drive (USB stick), for many of the same reasons I recommend making a bootable Mavericks installer drive: If you want to install the Yosemite beta on multiple Macs, using a bootable installer drive can be more convenient than downloading or copying the entire installer to each computer,” Dan Frakes writes for Macworld.
“If you need to erase the drive on your test Mac before installing Yosemite, or start over at any time, you can use a dedicated installer drive to boot that Mac, erase its drive, and then install the OS,” Frakes writes. “And if your beta-testing Mac is experiencing problems, a bootable installer drive makes a handy emergency disk.”
Frakes writes, “As with previous versions of OS X, it’s not difficult to create a bootable installer drive from the Yosemite beta installer, though the processes have changed slightly since Mavericks. ”
Read more in the full article here.
I’ve been reading MDN for the good part of last ten years, and I don’t remember them ever being so excited about a public beta of an upcoming Mac OS (not even in the time before iPhone, when Mac was much more prominent in the Mac Daily News…). There were 8 (eight!) stories about Yosemite beta since Wednesday (and it is still early on Friday).
I’m curious what could be the reason for such sudden exuberance.
The last time Apple had a public beta was in 2000 – Mac OS X Public Beta. A wait of 14 years – that makes it big news.
Exuberance is the right word. Many of us felt that electric zing in the initial rollout of OS X, born like Athena from the forehead of Zeus as it were, and experienced a kind of vital community that lifted it (and OS X Server) from the cradle and nurtured it. Redux 2014.
Resurrecting a thread from the dead, buried and possibly long reincarnated…
If you do the smart thing and install the Yosemite Beta on a volume (disk) that is NOT your usual day-to-day startup disk (“Macintosh HD”), you don’t need to do any of the stuff mentioned in this article.
You start up normally and download the Yosemite installer (like with Mavericks). When running the installer, select a disk that is NOT your usual startup disk as your target. The installer then creates the Yosemite system on that volume. When selecting a different volume, the installer does NOT erase itself, so you can repeat the process if you need to a new “clean install” of Yosemite. And most importantly, your current day-to-day startup disk is NOT affected.
If your Mac is recent enough to run Yosemite, it is likely to have an SDXC flash card slot. Even my 2011 Mac mini has one. You can get one that is 64GB for under $40 these days (sometimes on sale for much less). I found that I can format an SDXC card for Mac, install OS X on it, and boot the Mac from it. And it is quite fast; not as fast as an internal SSD, but as fast (or faster than) an internal hard drive, based on my experience.
(NOTE: 32GB is cheaper, but it’s a bit tight on space, especially if you want to install third-party apps for the beta testing. Plus OS X needs a good amount of free space on its startup disk to run efficiently.)
Install the Yosemite Beta on that SDXC card. This avoids having to create a new partition on your internal drive (which is a somewhat risky procedure itself), or running the Yosemite Beta from an external drive that is USB 2.0 or FireWire, which would work but may affect the experience with noticeable “lag.”
(Back up your user data. The internal drive volume will still be mounted when starting up from another disk, so it is possible for it to become corrupted or affected in some other way, while running Yosemite Beta from another disk.)
After the beta testing is done, you can put a “regular” OS X installation on that SDXC card, along with any third-party maintenance utilities you may own (such as TechTool Pro), and use it as your “emergency/maintenance startup disk.” Much better than using the built-in (but limited) Recovery HD.
I installed Yosemite at work on my spare partition and migrated everything from my Mavericks partition. So far so good. It’s very slow at times, but that’s to be expected. First production app to bite the dust: Outlook 2011, which will not open its main window. I don’t expect to see a patch for that. Citrix Receiver, no problem, so I can get work done. All my other core Mac apps work as they do under Mavericks, so I’ll be testing away the coming weeks :-).
First bug reported: At the end of the installation I was asked to migrate to iCloud Disk, to which I said no. In the iCloud Prefs it is listed as “on” anyways.