Long story short,

I messed up an old iMac trying to update it to Success' href='/2020/12/install-macos-catalina-on-supported-pc.html'>Catalina (formatted the recovery drive, lol - first time playing with a MAC). Soon enough i realized i could no longer boot into recovery.

So off i went to my special Rufus tool , which turns out does not work for mac images.

Let the Googling begin;

After many hours, i found the special trick posted on multiple sites.

The trick involves using Windows Disk Part - 'select disk' - 'convert gpt' - etc etc

The next part was to use "TransMac" - the "only tool for Windows" that could burn the mac image. Everyone who failed, failed because they didn't do the 'DiskPart' first.... (this is was my research led me to believe).

Many hours later, ive downloaded multiple macOS images from multiple sources.

Tried TransMac multiple times (and it takes over 10 hours to burn the image).

Multiple failed attempts later, and multiple attempts with different images, and a different USB - i came to the conclusion that TransMac is rubbish

\not to worry, i didnt pay for it :P*

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Behold , i found the answer!

Forum: https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/283190-bootdisk-utility/

DL Site: http://cvad-mac.narod.ru/index/bootdiskutility_exe/0-5

It turns out a dev going by the name of 'cvad' from Russia, created the tool we've all been looking for (before Windows XP time!). He has received little recognition , and his tool is AMAZING.

The latest version as of this post is:

Boot Disk Utility

(BDUtility.exe)

v2.1.2019

rev.026b

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Description from the source:

You can

Make bootable USB Flash Disk for macOS with Latest Clover bootloader revision
Download(with resuming) Latest! Apple Recovery HD package,
Extract HFS-Image and Restore it with BDU.
Automatically Check/Download the Latest Clover Rev.
and Use Zip and LZMA archives in Local Repository
with existing Clover Rev,
Download files from User Download List
and BDU Additional Download List,
build FreeDos bootable drive
with Volkov Commander.

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Description from me

His tool ;

-downloads the latest, Clover bootloader revision,

-converts and partitions your USB to the correct mac required format

-partitions your usb into 2 partitions, one of which it flashes the bootloader onto (approx 200mb) - and the other left empty

-then gives you a list of the latest macOS recovery images to choose from [Success' href='/2020/12/install-macos-catalina-on-supported-pc.html'>Catalina 2019, Success' href='/2020/12/install-macos-mojave-on-supported-pc.html'>Mojave 2019 etc etc] - you choose the one you want (approx 500mb)

-it downloads the recovery and flashes it onto the second partition

All of this done in 15mins max (unlike TransMac which one time took over 15 hours)

​

Give it a try and see for yourselves - its amazing - it grabs the images from official apple cdn servers.

if this tool helps you, give him a thumbs up somehow - he deserves it, and hasn't been noticed for all these years.