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I have a MacBook Pro 13' retina from April 2013. Yesterday I wanted to do a clean install of Yosemite. I formatted my USB as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and made the partition to be a GUID table partition.

Then I run this command to copy the bootable installation files of Yosemite to the USB: 

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

Everything went fine and to be sure I verified with Finder that the installation really was in the USB and not corrupted.

Then I rebooted my MacBook Pro, held the Options Button to get into the boot menu but there my USB wasn´t listed, only the harddrive and the recovery partition. I also tried the other USB port but id did not help. I have googled a lot of this issue but I haven´t found anything that helped. I have also tried the whole procedure of formatting the USB and putting the installation files 3 or 4 times now.

After some hours of tries to boot the USB I gave up. What I did instead was to open Disk Utilties (from my recovery partition) and format the harddrive, then install Mountain Lion and then make the upgrade to Yosemite. But that is not a clean install.

Any ideas why I could not boot from the USB?

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3 Answers 3

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I had the same problem. You have to drag the file from finder into terminal to get the official name of the installer. The end result is something like /Applications/Install OS\ X\ Yosemite.app

At least that is what worked for me.

Hope that helps.

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I was having the same issue. Made a bootable Yosimite USB, and when checking if I could select the USB at startup it wasn't showing up when using the option button at boottime.

I could however select the USB in the "Start-up disk" from the System Preferences, and the system would actually boot from the USB.

Now, I did get it working by pressing the C button at boottime, see also: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201255. It did take quite a while before the USB actually started loading though, so have some patience :-)

Hopefully this works for you too!

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I just got the same problem - I only had my hard drive and recovery. So I unplugged the USB and plugged it in again with then boot screen still up and it appeared!

Someone call the IT Crowd!!

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