Open the Boot Camp Assistant app, located in /Applications/Utilities/ (or launch it with Spotlight).

Connect the USB flash drive to the Mac – this will be erased and turn into the Windows bootable installer drive.

Have the Windows ISO file downloaded and somewhere easy to find.

How to Create a Windows 10 Installer Drive from Mac OS X with Boot Camp AssistantĮven though we’re focusing on just creating the installer drive for now, you may want to start and complete a back up of the Mac with Time Machine beforehand, particularly if you’re unfamiliar with formatting drives. So, have a USB flash drive and a Windows ISO file on your Mac? Then everything is ready to go, the rest is super easy. Interestingly enough, if you download the Windows 10 preview and install it onto any computer, Microsoft will offer the final build of Windows 10 for free on that machine, which is pretty generous and perhaps offers an added incentive to install Windows 10 on a Mac for users who were considering running Boot Camp anyway. If you need to download a Windows 10 ISO to work with, you can get one for free here from Insider Preview right now from Microsoft, the Windows Insider program is a bit like the Mac OS X Public Beta program offered by Apple (you may recall we used this same ISO of Windows 10 to run in VirtualBox atop MacOS X). To create the install disk, you’ll need a USB flash drive that’s at least 8GB in size which you don’t mind erasing, and a Windows 10 ISO (a Windows 8 ISO works fine too).

Here, we’re going to focus on making a bootable USB installer drive using a Windows 10 ISO from a Mac.

For the less familiar, using Boot Camp essentially means Windows 10 will run directly on the hardware as if the Mac were a PC, rather than in a virtual machine which runs Windows atop OS X, that translates to much better performance and a completely native experience – you boot the Mac, and you can choose to start Windows, or to start Mac OS X.

Make windows bootable usb on mac