Write .iso to USB on Mountain Lion [closed]

Question

I'm trying to create a bootable USB for Windows using Disk Utility on OS X 10.8.4. Downloaded CentOS 6 for 32-bit and tried to use Disk Utility to create a bootable USB drive. This method failed with one of the two following errors:

1. "Could not restore - Invalid argument"

2. "Could not restore - error 254"

None of these solutions worked:

• Convert the .iso to .dmg
• Change permissions to rwx+ugo on image
• Download image from another mirror
• Use "minimal" image vs "full"
• Change USB stick
• Restore the "/Volumes" image (i.e. dragging from Desktop, not left panel of DiskUtility)

UNetbootin appears to burn the image to the USB, but testing on a Windows box shows that the disk image is missing.

For more on the Disk Utility errors:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1389072 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1507263?start=0&tstart=0

Answer 1

did you try:

hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o ~/path/to/target.img ~/path/to/target.iso

after that unmount using:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX

(X is the disknumber of your usb device)

Now just burn it using dd

sudo dd if=/path/to/target.img of=/dev/rdiskN bs=1m

Answer 2

Depending on the distro (not sure about centOS), sometimes just extracting the raw ISO to a freshly formatted flash drive in FAT32 will work. Could you try that and see if it works?

Answer 3

You can try to "burn" the ISO to the USB stick with the command-line utility dd. To do so, you can follow these instructions on the Ubuntu site.

Essentially you have to convert the .iso to a .img disk image and then copy it, byte by byte, on the device.