In this tutorial, we will see how to create a bootable Ubuntu USB stick under Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal). This will help you install Ubuntu operating systems from USB flash drives without using a CD/DVD drive. Before we start, here are the requirements: No less than 2GB USB.
Why a flash drive? A bootable external or internal hard drive works well for desktop Macs but presents a cumbersome problem for notebook Macs. A flash drive is a simple, inexpensive, and portable emergency boot device that can handle OS X or the macOS. Heck, it can even have both operating systems installed, letting you use the emergency USB flash drive to boot any of the Mac's you may have.
Even if you don’t use a notebook, you may want to have a bootable USB flash drive on hand. What You Will Need.
We’ve chosen to use a 16 GB or larger flash drive as a minimum for two reasons. First, a 16 GB flash drive is large enough to accommodate the current minimum amount of space required to install OS X directly from the install DVD, or macOS from a download from the Mac app store, or from the Recovery HD. Eliminating the need to pare down the OS to get it to fit on the USB flash drive significantly simplifies the installation process. Second, the cost of USB flash drives is falling. A 16 GB USB flash drive is large enough to install both a complete copy of the and some of your favorite applications or recovery utilities, making it a budget-friendly emergency device that can boot your Mac and possibly repair or recover its data and get it running again.
It’s possible to install a bootable copy of OS X on USB flash drives smaller than 8 GB, but it requires fiddling around with OS X’s individual components and packages, removing the packages you don’t need, and paring down some of OS X’s capabilities. For this article, we’re going to forego the extra steps and all that fiddling, and instead install a fully functional copy of OS X onto a USB flash drive. We recommend a 16 GB or larger flash drive because it’s big enough to install a complete copy of OS X, with room to spare for a few applications. Insert the USB flash drive into your Mac’s USB port. Launch Disk Utility, located at /Applications/Utilities/. In the list of drives attached to your Mac, select the USB flash drive device. In our case, it’s called 14.9 GB SanDisk Cruzer Media.
(Like lumber, hard drives and flash drives are actually slightly smaller than their specs would have you believe.). Click the Partition tab. Select 1 Partition from the Volume Scheme drop-down menu. Enter a descriptive name for your flash drive; we chose Boot Tools.
Ubuntu has a great set of instructions on, but they have an additional step I found not to be needed: there’s no need to convert the Ubuntu ISO to an IMG file. You can simply download the Ubuntu ISO and use dd to copy it to a USB drive. Download the Ubuntu ISO Start by you want to boot from. Plugin the USB Drive Next, plug your USB drive into your Mac; it will automatically be mounted by OS X. Open Terminal and run the following command to figure out which device the USB drive was mapped to: diskutil list Once you figure out which device the USB drive was mapped to, unmount it ( disk2 is the device in this example, your device will probably be different): diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2 Copy the Contents of the Ubuntu ISO to the USB Drive The following steps will erase everything on your USB drive.
I am not responsible for any data loss. When the Ubuntu ISO finishes downloading, you are ready to copy it to the USB drive using dd: sudo dd if=/Downloads/ubuntu-14.04.3-server-amd64.iso of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1048576 You’ll notice a couple of odd things in this command. First, the block size value: bs=1048576. Most instructions would have bs=1Mb. OS X’s dd command is still a bit dated and doesn’t interpret anything but bytes. 1048576 is 1 in bytes. Second, the output file value: of=/dev/rdisk2.
Rdisk2 is used instead of disk2. I would try to explain it, but man hdiutil already does so well: Since any /dev entry can be treated as a raw disk image, it is worth noting which devices can be accessed when and how. /dev/rdisk nodes are character-special devices, but are “raw” in the BSD sense and force block-aligned I/O. They are closer to the physical disk than the buffer cache.
/dev/disk nodes, on the other hand, are buffered block-special devices and are used primarily by the kernel’s filesystem code. Additionally, read. The process may take a while to complete depending on the speed of your USB drive. Unmount the USB Drive Once the process is finished, OS X will try to mount the USB drive and will throw the following warning: You can safely ignore this error, and eject the USB drive through the modal dialog window or by using the following command: diskutil eject /dev/disk2 Boot from the USB Drive Finally, plug the USB drive into the computer you want to install Ubuntu on and boot from it. Modern laptops and desktop motherboards typically have several USB boot options. You may be required to boot to USB-HDD, USB-ZIP, USB-FDD, or USB-CDROM.
About Throughout my personal and professional IT career, I have created - and continue to create - a lot of technical documentation. I frequently reference that documentation, but it was only useful to me.
In order for that documentation to be - hopefully - useful to others, I needed a way to publish it, and a blog was the obvious choice. This blog has had a couple prior names (workingConfig and ThorneLaboratories), but I finally settled on ThorneLabs: a central location for my technical documentation, opinions, and reviews.