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How to make a Ubuntu bootable USB stick in OSX Maverick

Yesterday I had a little problem with my Ubuntu linux notebook. It was just because I installed Gnome 3.10 in my Ubuntu 13.10 and made it crash badly. I tried to reinstall my old notebook via bootable DVD, unfortunately the DVD-Rom did not work as I expected. So I tried to figure out how to solve it using USB stick. Another issue was that how to make it bootable using OSX Maverick notebook and I found this article.

The steps are exactly as similar as in the article, but I faced a little issue when it comes to convert .iso file to .img. Instead of execute it using hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o ~/path/to/target.img ~/path/to/ubuntu.iso , I didt it this way hdiutil convert ~/path/to/ubuntu.iso -format UDRW -o ~/path/to/target.img .

So, to summary, these are the steps I did to make a Ubuntu bootable USB stick in OSX Maverick:

  1. First of all, download the Ubuntu desktop iso file,
  2. Open the Terminal using Spotlight to be easier (cmd + space and type terminal, enter)
  3. Using Terminal, locate the .iso file on your notebook and run this command, 
    hdiutil convert ~/path/to/ubuntu.iso -format UDRW -o ~/path/to/target.img

    , as mentioned in the article, OS X tends to add .dmg to the .img file. That’s just fine, just remove the .dmg trailing.

  4. Insert your USB stick (at least 2 GB free space),
  5. Still in the Terminal, run diskutil list to get current list of devices attached to the notebook. Then determine the device node assigned to your USB stick, e.g /dev/disk1
  6. Unmount (not Eject) the USB by running diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1 . Note, replace number 1 in /dev/disk1 with whatever it assigned to USB when you do previous step.
  7. Do make bootable USB by executing this command, 
    sudo dd if=/path/to/ubuntu.img of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=1m
  8. If the process is finished, eject the stick using diskutil eject /dev/disk1 and remove it.
  9. Done and use it as bootable USB stick when you start the notebook you want to install Ubuntu.

That’s all the steps I’ve done and the bootable USB stick is working properl.

Source: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-mac-osx