Mac Os X Bootable Usb Software

Sep 14, 2015 Intel-based Mac; Bootable optical media (CD or DVD) on Macs equipped with Apple’s Super Drive or a USB thumb drive formatted with a GUID partition type and containing an OS X installer or a usable operating system. Apple advises against booting from external storage containing a version of Mac OS X earlier than the one your Mac shipped with. Zotac WinUSB is a leading USB bootable software. The software is the free and open source and is extremely lightweight at under 1 MB. With this, you enjoy, fastest file copy from directory or file using a dedicated memory stream allocation, Drag, and Drop based for all the functions that need to user data. Apr 10, 2020 Step 1: Right-click the software icon on desktop and select 'Run as Administrator' from the contextual menu.Choose 'Run' when prompted. Step 2: Insert your formatted USB drive, and click 'Burn' ta on the main screen. Step 3: Click 'Browse' button to import macOS dmg file into the program.And select the USB drive name from the second row. You can also set a volume labe for that USB drive.

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 In fact, it can even work out cheaper than burning a CD or DVD that you just throw away once the version is outdated.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. 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?

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.

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:

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 (FileVault 2) I enabled in Mac OS X.

As shown in the output above, the connected USB stick is a small 2.0 GB drive with a FAT partition on it. We are now going to remove this partition in the next step. For the following steps we will need the name of the disk which in this case is “/dev/disk2”.

With the following command the data on the disk (your USB stick) will be deleted!

With this command the USB stick was re-partitioned to have 1 partition without formatting and 100% of the size of the stick. If you check it again with “diskutil list” you will see the changes already, also the USB stick will no longer be shown in the Finder.

Copy the image to the USB stick

Now we can copy the disk image we created to the USB stick. This is done via the dd(1) command. This command will copy the image to the disk (substitute the appropriate disk name for your USB stick here, as with the re-partitioning command):

How To Make Mac Os Bootable Usb

The dd command does not show any output before it has finished the copy process, so be patient and wait for it to complete.