Creating bootable USB images on the Mac

Fri, Mar 27, 2015

Creating a bootable image for installing a Linux OS is pretty straight-forward but when you are doing this on the Mac there is a specific way it needs to be done. I alway use USB drives for this purpose so what follows are the steps needed to create a bootable USB stick from a Linux .iso image.

I presume you have already downloaded your favourate Linux distribution in .iso format, below I’m using Debian Jessie.

First conver the .iso image into a .img image.

$ hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o debian-jessie-DI-rc1-amd64-netinst.img debian-jessie-DI-rc1-amd64-netinst.iso

You then need to find your USB drive.

$ diskutil list

Look for USB device. I’ll use /dev/disk7 for this example. First make sure it is unmounted.

$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk7

Then copy the image to the USB stick. CAUTION This will overwrite anything that is already on the drive.

$ sudo dd if=debian-jessie-DI-rc1-amd64-netinst.img.dmg of=/dev/disk7

Safely eject the USB disk before using it for booting on your target device.

$ diskutil eject /dev/disk7

And there you have it, a bootable, Linux install USB drive.

Tags:

[Development] [Mac] [Linux]