Have you ever thought of carrying your Mac OS on an external device and gain access to it at any time? If the reaction is yes, then you have arrived at the right post. We will be providing you with the information through which you can install macOS High Sierra on an external drive.
Part 1. How to Install macOS High Sierra on the External Drive
Before beginning the process, there are a few requisites that you must meet. You will need an external drive with a minimum capacity of 16 GB, and second, you will need the copy of the macOS High Sierra installer. You can obtain the installer from the App Store by searching for 'macOS' and download it to your Mac hard drive.
How to create a bootable macOS High Sierra installer drive Put the macOS High Sierra installer on an external USB thumb drive or hard drive and use it to install the operating system on a Mac. May 30, 2017 Encrypting a USB Drive on a Mac Made Easy macOS 10.12.x “Sierra” Edition & 10.13.x “High Sierra” Edition A YouTube video of these instructions can be found here! (NOTE: This was written for OS X 10.12.5 “Sierra.”If you’re looking for the Mac OS 10.11.x “El Capitan” edition, click here.The original blog entry written for OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” can be found here).
Mar 03, 2020 Part 2. How to Use macOS High Sierra with the Bootable Hard Drive As you now have macOS High Sierra in the form of bootable hard drive, you can use it with another compatible Mac or when the situation demands. However, remember that using the external device as a bootable drive will slow down the functioning of the system. ^ After following Pavel's GUID partition advice, you could also refer to the following Seagate Knowledge Base article if you'd like to use our free Seagate Dashboard software to encrypt your drive. Just make sure in any event to be overly cautious with keeping your encryption passwords/keys extremely available.
Mac Encrypt Usb Drive
Pl2303 mac os x driver download. Step 1: Formatting the External Drive
To allow the external drive to function as the startup disk, you need to format it to Mac OS Extended and employ GUID partition map. Start the utility disk. You can find it under the Applications category or search it using Spotlight.
As utility disk runs in the background, you can check for the format of the external drive. In the following example, the drive is in Master Boot Record format. First, unmount the drive. After unmounting, you can select the same drive from the left of the window as shown in the figure below. Now, from the tabs that appear in right window, choose 'Erase' option.
Encrypt External Hard Drive Mac Os High Sierra 2
In the next window, you can now format the external drive as 'Mac OS Extended' and opt for GUID Partition Map. If you choose to, you can also give it a name. Press 'Erase' to proceed. After completion, you will see the following screen. Press 'Done' to proceed.
Step 2: Installing macOS High Sierra on the External Drive
After you complete the download of the macOS installer, double click the same from the Applications folder to begin the installation procedure. Press 'Continue' in the following screen.
Click 'Agree' to the accept license agreement. In the next window, press the 'Show all disks' option. The window will display the local drive and the connected external drive. Choose the external drive in this case. You will have to key in your system user name and password.
macOS High Sierra will begin installing on the selected external hard disk. It requires some time to complete the task. You can wait until the process is complete. Before it completes the installation, the Mac will restart. Therefore, it is preferable to save any other work that is in progress.
After restarting, the Mac will take a minimum of 15 minutes to complete the installation process. It will then reboot from the new device. You then have to proceed with the general process of activating Siri, time zone, and adding the user account. Once you complete these actions, you will possess the new version of macOS High Sierra on your external drive. Do not remove the external drive, as Mac OS will access the files on the drive periodically. You can now use the same every time you wish to use High Sierra.
Part 2. How to Use macOS High Sierra with the Bootable Hard Drive
As you now have macOS High Sierra in the form of bootable hard drive, you can use it with another compatible Mac or when the situation demands. However, remember that using the external device as a bootable drive will slow down the functioning of the system. More importantly, it is useful only when you are facing trouble with your existing internal drive of the Mac.
The following information will be helpful in case if you choose to use macOS High Sierra with the bootable hard drive:
Step 1: If there is a trouble with the current hard disk, and you wish to solve it or use the new version of the OS, then plug the bootable external drive to the Mac.
Step 2: Power on the machine and hold the option button until you notice the recovery screen appear. From the screen, you can choose the bootable external device that you have created.
Step 3: You will boot into the macOS High Sierra version for that particular session.
Recoverit
- Complete set of extraction tools
- Cost effective method in comparison to technician's bills
- Intuiting wizard based layout
- Retrieve 550+ file from any category
Related Articles & Tips
So you have some files that you don’t want anyone accessing. Your Mac is already pretty secure, but what happens when you want to encrypt a USB drive?
This is where disk encryption comes in. Basically, it’ll keep your USB thumb drive safe by encrypting the data on it and requiring a password to access it.
You may not know this, but macOS actually has a few built-in USB encryption features baked into its software — letting you encrypt and decrypt USB drives and other storage media on the fly. Here’s how to use them.
Contents
- 2 Leverage Disk Utility on macOS to encrypt USB drives
- 3 USB drive encryption that works with Windows PC and Mac
Related:
Use Finder to encrypt USB drives on MacBook
As of macOS Mojave, you can easily encrypt and decrypt generic mass storage devices on-the-go using Finder.
This uses XTS-AES encryption, which is the same type of encryption that the macOS FileVault 2 system uses. Keep in mind that using Finder to encrypt a thumb drive will restrict its usage to macOS. You won’t be able to access the data on it on a Windows or Linux machine.
- Plug your thumb drive or generic mass storage medium into your Mac.
- Open Finder.
- Right-click the thumb drive in the left sidebar. It’ll be under Locations
- Click on Encrypt “(Name of mass storage drive)”. If you don’t see this option, skip to the note below.
- Finder will now prompt you to enter a password and a hint. This will be used to access the data on your thumb drive — so don’t lose it!
- When all of that is typed in, click Encrypt Disk.
Finder will then encrypt your thumb drive. Depending on how much data is on it, the process could take a while.
To access the contents of the thumb drive, you’ll need to input the password that you created earlier. There’s absolutely no way to reset this password, so make sure you write it down in a safe place or use a password management platform.
Note: If you don’t see the Encrypt option when you right-click the thumb drive, it means that the USB storage device isn’t in the proper format to use the baked-in macOS encryption. You’ll need to use the following method to encrypt your drive.
Leverage Disk Utility on macOS to encrypt USB drives
As we covered, if you don’t see the Encrypt option, it means that your USB device hasn’t been formatted with a GUID partition map — which is a requirement for Finder encryption.
To get the encryption option, you’ll need to erase your thumb drive and then encrypt it in Disk Utility. Of course, make sure to copy all of the data from your USB drive to a safe location. Somewhere on your Mac’s internal disk is a good option. Once your data is somewhere safe, you can go about actually erasing and encrypting your flash drive.
- Open Disk Utility. You’ll find it in Applications —> Utilities in Finder or in the Utilities folder in Launchpad.
- In the top Disk Utility menu bar, click on View.
- Now, select the Show All Devices option to check it if it isn’t ticked already.
- Select your USB thumb drive from the left-hand sidebar. Make sure to click on the top option, not any subsequent device names listed underneath it.
- Click the Erase option in the Disk Utility toolbar.
- Give your USB thumb drive a new name.
- Under the Scheme menu, make sure you have GUID Partition Map selected. You’ll need to change this before selecting the Format. Which brings us to…
- Under the Format menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted).
From here, you’ll be prompted to input a password and hint again. Like with the Finder method, you’ll want to keep this in a safe place because there’s no option to reset it. When you’re done, click on Erase.
When all is said and done, copy all of the data that was originally on your thumb drive back from the safe location. Once it’s on the drive, it’ll automatically be encrypted and password-protected.
Alternate method
Alternatively, you can also set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the Scheme to GUID Partition Map. This won’t encrypt your USB drive within Disk Utility, but it will allow you to encrypt it using the simple Finder method.
This may be the preferred option if you don’t want to commit to an encrypted drive and password immediately, but you want to be able to encrypt your storage medium on-the-go later on using Finder.
USB drive encryption that works with Windows PC and Mac
The above two methods will make sure that your data is safe and protected no matter what happens. But, of course, they’ll only work on macOS devices. This is because the Mac OS Extended format, true to its name, is only compatible with Apple computers.
If you need to access your data from a Windows PC or a Linux machine, then you’ll want to opt for a third-party encryption solution. A couple of high-quality options are DiskCryptor and VeraCrypt.
They’re both completely free to use and open source, but they don’t skimp on the encryption quality. In fact, both apps offer a variety of different encryption options — such as AES, Twofish and Serpent.
![Encrypt Encrypt](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/screen-shot-2018-03-26-at-4-05-49-pm.jpg?w=800)
You can’t go wrong with either. They’re both also fairly simple to use, so we’ll refrain from offering any in-depth instructions on how to encrypt using them. Just make sure to encrypt your drive using a Windows- or Linux-compatible format like FAT32.
For more information, you can visit their respective websites.
If you use USB drives to carry information, it is always a good idea to encrypt the drive so that your privacy and security is protected in the case you lose the drive. This is particularly true if you use thumb drives to store personal photos or contract documents etc. We hope that you find these tips helpful. Please let us know in the comments below if you have any questions for us.
Mike is a freelance journalist from San Diego, California.
While he primarily covers Apple and consumer technology, he has past experience writing about public safety, local government, and education for a variety of publications.
He’s worn quite a few hats in the journalism field, including writer, editor, and news designer.