Burn Images To USB Thumbs From A Mac Like A Boss

This one goes out to all my homies who end up googling how to burn ISOs about once every year when they sufficiently screw a box and need a fresh reinstall. Here’s the process yo:

First off, I already wrote about this once for sd cards, if you are looking for that please look here: https://iwearshorts.com/blog/raspberry-pi-the-5-minute-setup/

If you are looking to burn a live usb drive here it is:

Let’s say we’ve downloaded an iso, but we need to convert it to an image. This can be done like this:

hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o ~/path/to/target.img ~/path/to/ubuntu.iso

Make sure and remove the .dmg at the end, god dammit mac…

Next make sure your usb thumb drive is NOT in your computer and run:

diskutil list

Now insert the thumb drive and run the same command again:

diskutil list

Find the difference. It’s usually something like “/dev/disk2”. Unmount the usb drive:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN

Now run dd on the shit (make sure you replace the parts of this command with your own information):

sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/rdiskN bs=1m

Make sure you wait, dd won’t tell you of its progress so you will just have the wait. Now ejeculate the drive:

diskutil eject /dev/diskN

Boom!

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