Creating bootable flash drives from Mac OS X
May 1, 2010
I’m writing this up in case I forget yet again…
To create a bootable USB drive on OSX, no external tools are needed – it can be done with the “diskutil” tool that comes with OSX.
Procedure:
- Download the desired .img or ISO file
- Open a Terminal
- Run diskutil list to get the current list of devices
- Insert your flash media
- Run diskutil list again and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g. /dev/disk2)
- Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
- Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/diskN bs=1m
- Run diskutil eject /dev/diskN and remove your flash media when the command completes
Note: I never got the flash drive to boot when creating it from an ISO. But it may have been because my netbook can’t boot from USB… However, I remember successfully using this method in the past for creating bootable flash drives from IMG files.
January 6, 2013 at 12:37 am
Did you know that USB flash drive can be used for RAM? The windows 7 readyboost feature lets you do it. But you will wear it out.
January 6, 2013 at 2:11 pm
Did you know that USB flash drive can be used for virtual RAM? It is like the swap file or page file. The windows 7 readyboost feature lets you do it. But you will wear it out.
January 7, 2013 at 9:53 am
Hi Ken! No, I didn’t know that. Is that related to this blog post?