RC Logr 20190227 123708

Wednesday, 27 Feb, 2019

You can use the dd command to write a downloaded .iso file to a USB stick, for booting and installing and so on. You need to be careful when using dd, because it is possible to overwrite an entire drive (hence the nickname: disk destroyer). A GUI alternative is «balenaEtcher», a cross-platform app written to make the OS flash-to-media process easy and safe. (It is an electron app, so I should say it is brought to you by 10,000 javascript files… 🙀)

On Mac, the non-GUI, old fashioned dd style command sequence is something like:

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diskutil list
diskutil unmountDisk disk2 (substitute the correct one)
sudo dd if=/path/to/theLinux.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=8m
diskutil eject disk2

On Linux:

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fdisk -l (do before and after usb insertion)
umount /dev/sdb1
sudo dd if=/path/to/theLinux.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=8M
qemu -hda /dev/sdb