• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Booting from a USB stick is nowadays more and more important. More and more PCs (and servers) are delivered by default without a CD/DVD drive. To install the OS of your choice, USB sticks provide you the easiest possibility. In fact, it can even work out cheaper than burning a CD or DVD that you just throw away once the version is outdated. For most Linux distributions the ISO for burning a CD/DVD is available freely on the internet.

Insert the USB drive into the Mac and launch Disk Utility. Click on the USB drive from the left-hand menu and select the Partition tab. Method 2: Creating a Bootable USB Drive from Mac. If you need to create a bootable USB Drive with the Ubuntu distribution from a Mac, there’s no other native way to do it than from using the Terminal. However, we’re going to show you a much simpler way to do this.

In this post I’ll assume you have already downloaded the bootable ISO image for the OS of your choice, but how to get the ISO image onto the USB stick? Advertisements The ISO file you have downloaded contains an image of the entire media. It includes all the files necessary to boot your PC/server. This image format is sadly not directly usable to copy onto the USB stick. We first need to convert the image from an ISO to a UDRW (Read/Write Universal Disk Image Format) which we can copy to the USB stick.

Some of the steps to create a bootable USB stick could be done in the GUI as well, but as some of them can’t and you have to go to the shell anyway, I decided to do all of the steps in the shell. Convert the ISO to UDRW format Mac OS X provides all the tools needed to convert the ISO image to UDRW. The following command will convert the ISO image to the UDRW format. Hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o destination_file.img source_file.iso You will notice that the destination_file.img from the command will create the file destination_file.img.dmg really. This is because the hdiutil program automatically adds the dmg file extension. This is not a problem as the file extension won’t affect the format of the image.

Prepare the USB stick Check your USB stick and make a backup if there is any important data on it, as the next steps are going to delete everything on it. To prepare the USb stick we are going to delete all the partitions on the stick and create an empty partition.

To do this we need to know the device name of the USB stick. Open a terminal and execute the following command: $ diskutil list You will see a list of disks and partitions. The goal is to identify the USB stick in this output. Depending on your system configuration your output might look different from this one. This appears to show 3 physical discs but it does not. The /dev/disk1 is a virtual disk created because of the partition encryption () I enabled in Mac OS X.