I had some difficulties creating a bootable USB stick on MacOSX. Most guides use
This article was very helpful, and confirms what I was thinking. The main difference is that this method makes a MBR partition table, adds MBR boot code and puts the data onto the first partition (as opposed to putting the data straight onto the disk).
As a summary (and backup in case the article goes offline):
hdiutil and dd to put the image on the stick, but this failed to boot on my linux machine…This article was very helpful, and confirms what I was thinking. The main difference is that this method makes a MBR partition table, adds MBR boot code and puts the data onto the first partition (as opposed to putting the data straight onto the disk).
As a summary (and backup in case the article goes offline):
- (Re)partition the stick using Disk Utility with 1 FAT partition, MBR partition table
- Unmount the disk
- Make the partition active. In Terminal, do:
sudo fdisk -e /dev/SOMEdisk2
print
f 1
write
print
exit - Get the
mbr.binfile from syslinux. I used one from here (for the paranoid, my mbr.bin MD5’s to 8cb37afc263a219ebb7586f9c495114e) - Copy it onto the stick, without overwriting your partition table:
sudo dd conv=notrunc bs=440 count=1 if=mbr.bin of=/dev/SOMEdisk2 - Use UNetbootin to do the rest.
