Whether it’s an external hard drive or a USB ‘thumb’ drive, both are considered bootable drives.įor the sake of clarity, we’ll simply refer to any external drive as a USB drive.īefore you begin, you’ll need to download the macOS version you’d like to use directly from Apple. Simply stated, a bootable USB Mac drive is one that has a version (or versions) of macOS available on a disk that isn’t your machine. Try free What is a Bootable USB or External Drive?