Creating a bootable USB drive from ISO on mac

Get a list of the current drives that are mounted. It will be something like “/dev/disk2″. Notice the number at the end, this is the most important part. The current format of the usb drive does not matter as the dd command will erase any files on the disk.

diskutil list

Use that /dev/disk link to unmount the disk

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

Now that we no longer have the drive mounted. We need to run the command to convert and copy over the disk image to the usb. We can do so by using the following. if is the path to the iso image, of is the disk image we found in step one. bs is the block size. If you wish to tinker with the speed at which it writes, here is a handy link to learn more

sudo dd if=~/Desktop/my_image.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m

Go grab a beer, this is going to take a bit. It will look like nothing is happening, but believe me, it is. Make sure you computer does not fall asleep, when it’s done it will return to the command prompt. Once this is up, eject your disk and you are good to go!

diskutil eject /dev/disk2