Video Tip: Creating a bootable Mavericks USB installer

Having a bootable USB flash drive of your operating system is a very useful tool to have around for diagnostics, maintenance or fresh clean installs of your OS. In the past few versions of OS X, if you wanted to create a bootable USB stick, you had to do a little bit of Erica Sadun-style nerd wizardry or download a third-party tool like Lion Disk Maker to create one. Luckily with Mavericks, Apple has included a tool to allow us to create a bootable USB flash drive with a few simple terminal commands.

This video will show you how to do it, so go grab an 8 GB or larger USB stick and follow along.

Difficulty:

Easy

What you need:

• Terminal (in the Utilities folder or press cmd+shift+u from the Finder)

• USB flash drive of 8 GB or larger capacity

• The Install OS X Mavericks App from the Mac App Store

• About 20 ~ 30 mins (don't remove the flash drive until you see "Done" in the terminal)

The Command:

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

Note: Remember to replace 'Untitled' with your flash drives name. Most freshly formatted flash dives are named 'Untitled' unless you change it as I did.

That's it!

Update: Lion Disk Maker released DiskMaker X 3.0.1 and it supports Mavericks