Mac multiboot flash drive

I am in the process of creating a multiboot drive with OS X starting from 10.7 up to 10.12 (Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan and Sierra). I have bought Kingston DT micro 3.1 64GB and created a separate partition for each OS and their updates. The usb drive is formatted in GUID partition scheme.

When I have completed creating bootable partitions, I decided to test if they will boot on my MBA early 2015. And it turns out that only Sierra and El Capitan will proceed to boot, other partitions will either not be recognised at all or will just show a Prohibitory symbol (meaning it could not find a valid System folder).

I have used the following command to create all the install media:

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

For Lion and Mountain Lion I have used the restore disk utility functionality as they do not have createinstallmedia command.

I am doing all of the operations on Sierra 10.12.3.

Here are the guesses what I have:

• Flash drive could have a certain partitioning limit
• OS X below 10.11 will not boot on newer hardware
• Each partition should have a free space buffer - currently each partition has just enough space for the OS with 200-300mb spare space
• It is solely the USB3.1 issue - I did not have any problems with doing the same thing on USB2.0
• The usb drive is fake - no idea how to test this

I have also noticed that it takes up to couple of minutes to recognise the drive itself and its partitions in disk utility.

What else should I try to successfully create a multiboot drive?

Solution 1:

The Early 2015 MacBook Air can not boot anything earlier than 10.10.2. So anything earlier than Yosemite definitely don't work on that machine. As to why Yosemite doesn't work you need to make sure you're not installing 10.10 or 10.10.1. Just re-download the Yosemite installer from the App Store it will give you the most recent to version of Yosemite.