How can I create a bootable USB stick on an Apple Macbook
Solution 1
New Method using Etcher
- Make sure you have a USB Stick with at least 4GB of free space.
- Get your Ubuntu ISO from here.
- Open Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities
- Select the USB stick and select Erase (This will remove all data stored on the USB drive)
- Select the format: MS-DOS (FAT) and scheme: GUID Partition Map
-
Click
Erase
- Download, install and open Etcher (By default MacOS blocks running apps from unidentified developers. Follow this tutorial if you are experiencing problems with this.)
- Select image and navigate to the location you saved the Ubuntu ISO you have downloaded in step 2
- Select the USB drive you have formatted in step 3-6.
-
Click
Flash
- Congratulations! You now have Ubuntu on a USB stick, bootable and ready to go!
Old Method using UNetbootin (might still work)
- Make sure you have a USB Stick with at least 4GB of free space.
- Download and install UNetbootin USB installer
- Download The Ubuntu Desktop ISO of your choice
-
Launch UNetbootin and allow the osascript to make changes
-
Select the Diskimage radio button and then click the ... button
-
Select the ubuntu ISO file you downloaded and click 'Open'
- Then select your flash drive in the bottom row and click 'OK'
- After Unetbootin finishes, click 'Exit' and now you have yourself an Ubuntu USB stick.
Solution 2
1) Find the file path to your USB drive with
diskutil list external
You're looking for /dev/diskN. It's probably /dev/disk2, but double check that the NAME
and SIZE
columns make sense. The dd
command you're going to run later will effectively delete all data on the drive so don't get this wrong. If that command produces no output, your USB drive is probably not plugged in.
2) Unmount the device so you can overwrite it (change N
to the number you got from the previous step)
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
3) Use dd
to copy the .iso image to the USB with
sudo dd if=/path/to/your/iso-file.iso of=/dev/diskN
That step will take a while. When it's finished you might get an error saying that the disk can't be read, you can click "Eject" and you're done; use your USB stick to boot Ubuntu. If you don't get that error, you should eject it with 4)
diskutil eject /dev/diskN
You can speed up the dd
command by adding bs=1m
(if you get the invalid number: ‘1m’
error change "m" to an uppercase "M" (this can happen if you installed a newer version of coreutils with homebrew)) and using /dev/rdiskN instead of /dev/diskN (use /dev/diskN
for the diskutil
commands though). You can get dd to report progress with status=progress
. This would all look like
sudo dd bs=1m status=progress if=ubuntu-19.10-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/rdiskN
With my cheap USB 2.0 drive I get 3.6 MB/s (9 minutes) with these options vs 0.8 MB/s (40 minutes) without them.
Solution 3
Format your USB stick in FAT32 then open a terminal and type
dd if=/path/to/file.iso of=/path/of/mounted/usb
Substitute the strings after = signs with your real paths.
That's really quicker than other method!
Solution 4
sudo dd if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/disk3
where disk3 is your usb device. You need to umount the usb device before performing this operation.
dd is a dangerous command and can erase your disk completely. of=/dev/diskx this x should never be your internal disk. Make sure you have not put your internal disk after "of=/dev/"
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Patricia Wells
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Patricia Wells over 1 year
How do I create a bootable USB stick for Ubuntu using an Apple Macbook that can then be used on my Windows PC to replace it with Ubuntu?
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Cyber_Star almost 8 yearsThis is to create a windows sick tho but he want's a ubuntu stick.
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GTRONICK almost 8 yearsWrong understanding. I read "...upgrade a windows PC...", so, i though, "he wants to upgrade his windows 8 to windows 10", because no "Ubuntu" is mentioned. Just didn't catch the idea. Thanks for the corrections.
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Cyber_Star almost 8 yearsYeh thats what i tought aswel thats why i commented it :)
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erikvimz over 6 yearsDoes one need to format USB stick before doing this procedure?
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Cyber_Star over 6 years@Eric No Unetbootin will format the drive for you.
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Andrea Lazzarotto about 6 yearsYou do not need to format the drive with Etcher, it flashes the ISO directly on it.
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Philippe Paré almost 5 yearsThis worked fine for me with 18.04 iso. I was able to use the resultant usb to boot into it on a macbook.
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damadam over 4 yearsCan you explain how these command lines works?
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mjs over 4 years@damadam Does it work?
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damadam over 4 yearsI don't know, I can't test it
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Boris Verkhovskiy over 4 yearsI don't see the point of making this one line bash function instead of just invoking
dd
as already suggested by @MKay -
mjs over 4 yearsif you have a bunch of usable code ... dd in one case and other commands other times. which is easier to remember? all of them or through a consistent api that will give you what you need? m.apple.disk.format. it has to be the latter, otherwise you wouldn't have found this answer by googling ;) now take it down.. or try use dd through your memory in one years time again! how would you take it down? in a note file? or by declaring that method above, which in this case was just that command. but your question is valid in this example alone. for all 2+ liners, it wouldn't. I am just consistent.
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Wouter over 3 yearsYou cannot select "GUID Partition Map" anymore on Mac OS Catalina. Where is it?