Create Bootable USB for Mac on Windows 10, Mac and Windows file system is completely different, so you are not able to create bootable USB for Mac with PowerShell, CMD or Rufus. If you remembered, till MacOS sierra the Apple file system was Hackintosh, but MacOS 10.13 High Sierra has the technology of Apple Filesystem. That’s why we can’t create bootable USB with Windows tools. So, have a USB flash drive and a Windows ISO file on your Mac? Then everything is ready to go, the rest Have the Windows ISO file downloaded and somewhere easy to find. Connect the USB flash Select the destination USB disk for the Windows 10 ISO to turn into the bootable installer drive, then.
I bought a Macbook Air yesterday after Dell lost my laptop from their service centre last month. And among the first few things I did was to dual boot Mac OS X with Ubuntu Linux.
I’ll cover up Linux installation on Macbook in later articles as first we need to learn how to create a bootable Ubuntu USB drive for Mac in OS X. While it is fairly easy to create a bootable USB in Ubuntu or in Windows, it is not the same story in Mac OS X. This is why the official Ubuntu guide suggest to use a disk rather than USB for live Ubuntu in Mac. Considering my Macbook Air neither has a CD drive nor do I possess a DVD, I preferred to create a live USB in Mac OS X.
Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Drive in Mac OS X As I said earlier, creating a bootable USB in Mac OS X is a tricky procedure, be it for Ubuntu or any other bootable OS. But don’t worry, following all the steps carefully will have you going. Let’s see what you need to for a bootable USB: Step 1: Format the USB drive Apple is known for defining its own standards and no surprises that Mac OS X has its own file system type known as Mac OS Extended. So the first thing you would need to do is to format your USB drive in Mac OS Extended format.
To format the USB drive, plug in the USB key. Go to Disk Utility program from Launchpad (A rocket symboled icon in the bottom plank). In Disk Utility, from the left hand pane, select the USB drive to format. Click the Partition tab in the right side pane.
From the drop-down menu, select 1 Partition. Name this drive anything you desire. Next, change the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) The screenshot below should help you. There is one last thing to do before we go with formatting the USB. Click the Options button in the right side pane and make sure that the partition scheme is GUID Partition Table. When all is set to go, just hit the Apply button. It will give you a warning message about formatting the USB drive.
Of course hit the Partition button to format the USB drive. Step 2: Download Ubuntu Of course, you need to download ISO image of Ubuntu desktop. Since you are using a Macbook Air, I suggest you to download the 64 Bit version of whichever version you want. Ubuntu 14.04 is the latest LTS version, and this is what I would recommend to you.
Step 3: Convert ISO to IMG The file you downloaded is in ISO format but we need it to be in IMG format. This can be easily done using command tool. Open a terminal, either from Launchpad or from the Spotlight, and then use the following command to convert the ISO to IMG format: hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o /Path-to-IMG-file /Path-to-ISO-file Normally the downloaded file should be in /Downloads directory.
So for me, the command is like this: hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o /Downloads/ubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64 /Downloads/ubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64.iso You might notice that I did not put a IMG extension to the newly converted file. It is fine as the extension is symbolic and it is the file type that matters not the file name extension. Also, the converted file may have an additional.dmg extension added to it by Mac OS X. Don’t worry, it’s normal. Step 4: Get the device number for USB drive The next thing is to get the device number for the USB drive. Run the following command in terminal: diskutil list It will list all the ‘disks’ currently available in the system. You should be able to identify the USB disk by its size.
To avoid confusion, I would suggest that you should have just one USB drive plugged in. In my case, the device number is 2 (for a USB of size 8 GB): /dev/disk2 When you got the disk number, run the following command: diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN Where N is the device number for the USB you got previously. So, in my case, the above command becomes: diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2 The result should be: Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful.
Step 5: Creating the bootable USB drive of Ubuntu in Mac OS X And finally we come to the final step of creating the bootable USB drive. We shall be using which is a very powerful and must be used with caution.
Therefore, do remember the correct device number of your USB drive or else you might end up corrupting Mac OS X. Use the following command in terminal: sudo dd if=/Path-to-IMG-DMG-file of=/dev/rdiskN bs=1m Here, we are using dd (copy and convert) to copy and convert input file (if) IMG to diskN. I hope you remember where you put the converted IMG file, in step 3.
For me the command was like this: sudo dd if=/Downloads/ubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64.dmg of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m As we are running the above command with super user privileges (sudo), it will require you to enter the password. Similar to Linux, you won’t see any asterisks or something to indicate that you have entered some keyboard input, but that’s the way Unix terminal behaves. Even after you enter the password, you won’t see any immediate output and that’s normal. It will take a few minutes for the process to complete. Step 6: Complete the bootable USB drive process Once the dd command finishes its process, you may see a dialogue box saying: The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.
Everything is just fine. Just don’t click either of Initialize, Ignore or Eject just now. Go back to the terminal. You’ll see some information about the last completed process.
For me it was: 1109+1 records in 1109+1 records out bytes transferred in 77.611025 secs (14984164 bytes/sec) Now, in the terminal use the following command to eject our USB disk: diskutil eject /dev/diskN N is of course the device number we have used previously which is 2 in my case: diskutil eject /dev/disk2 Once ejected, click on Ignore in the dialogue box that appeared previously. Now your bootable USB disk is ready. Remove it from the system. Step 7: Checking your newly created bootable USB disk Once you have completed the mammoth task of creating a live USB of USB in Mac OS X, it is time to test your efforts.
Plugin the bootable USB and reboot the system. At start up when the Apple tune starts up, press and hold option (or alt) key.
This should present you with the available disks to boot in to. I presume you know what to do next. For me it showed tow EFI boot: I selected the first one and it took me straight to Grub screen: I hope this guide helped you to create a bootable USB disk of Ubuntu for Mac in OS X. We’ll see how to dual boot Ubuntu with OS X in next article.
If you want to install Windows 10 on to a Mac to use via Boot Camp then using the Boot Camp Assistant is the best option. Some newer Macs can do this without needing any external boot drive e.g. USB stick and purely by copying the ISO in to the Windows partition it creates. See If your Mac does not support this new feature it should offer the option to create a USB install drive which needs to be a USB2 drive of 8GB or greater in size.
If however you want to create a bootable Windows USB installer for use on a real PC not a Mac then Boot Camp Assistant is not suitable. In this case you maybe able to do this using the free Unetbootin tool. See This tool is mainly for creating Linux install drives but apparently can also be used with a Windows 10 ISO image to make a Windows 10 install drive. See Not all PCs support booting from USB and some may need their BIOS settings adjusted to enable this. Potentially you could burn the Windows 10 ISO to a DVD disc and boot that on the real PC.
If you want to install Windows 10 on to a Mac to use via Boot Camp then using the Boot Camp Assistant is the best option. Some newer Macs can do this without needing any external boot drive e.g. USB stick and purely by copying the ISO in to the Windows partition it creates. See If your Mac does not support this new feature it should offer the option to create a USB install drive which needs to be a USB2 drive of 8GB or greater in size.
If however you want to create a bootable Windows USB installer for use on a real PC not a Mac then Boot Camp Assistant is not suitable. In this case you maybe able to do this using the free Unetbootin tool. See This tool is mainly for creating Linux install drives but apparently can also be used with a Windows 10 ISO image to make a Windows 10 install drive.
See Not all PCs support booting from USB and some may need their BIOS settings adjusted to enable this. Potentially you could burn the Windows 10 ISO to a DVD disc and boot that on the real PC. Apple Footer. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only.
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