

In the future, if you wish to boot from your previous OS version, just restart, holding down the Option key. Once the installation is complete, you'll be asked to go through the OS X Yosemite Setup Assistant to add information like your iCloud account and password.Click the Install button, accept terms and conditions, and then you're on your way. Select your flash drive, in this case "Yosemite Sam" (see image below).Click Continue, and the following screen is displayed. Launch the installer and it will display a splash screen.

The rest of the installation is actually quite simple.Shawn "Doc Rock" Boyd set up a similar drive with legacy operating system installers and Yosemite, which he uses not only to try out the new OS, but to work with his consulting clients. Note that you might want to create several partitions.Once complete, I checked the logical partition to make sure that it was indeed bootable (see image below), and then it was off to the races. My flash drive came with some oddball DOS-based format I erased it in Disk Utility, then created one full-sized partition set up as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). You just need to make sure that it's properly formatted and partitioned.

I picked up a PNY 64 GB USB 3.0 drive from Amazon for US$26 perfect for installing Yosemite, Xcode 6, or other apps that you'd like to test with OS X 10.10.
