# Making a Bootable USB Drive in OS X



## Niels Olson (Apr 24, 2007)

So I wanted to have Debian-on-a-stick so I could show my friends Linux. I was using OS X on a laptop, so the dd command on debian-live's wiki wasn't going work. Those directions probably work fine in Linux. Google turned up this page, but that didn't quite work either, though it's pretty good. So this is what I did in an OS X terminal:



> dd if=debian-live-etch+beryl-i386-gnome-desktop.img of=/dev/disk1



Note, I didn't have OS X unmount and remount the drive before starting the dd, contrary to the advice in  the link above. OS X gave me a warning about this when I executed the dd command, that I had inappropriately unmounted a drive and this might cause me to lose data. So? I'm replacing the entire disk image. The thumbdrive I was using, a SanDisk 1.0GB mini cruzer, had some other software on it, that they called U3 System, which appeared as a separate disk image on my OS X desktop. Skype demo, that kind of stuff. So when I put the stick in my ibook, I used to get two images on my desktop, NO NAME and U3 System. Now I get DEBIAN-LIVE and U3 System. You'd think if I dd the whole-disk partition (disk1), then that U3 System stuff would go away too, but it didn't. Don't know why. Every time I tried following the mount/umount directions in the link above, OS X would umount both NO NAME and U3 System from /Volumes and /dev at the same time. Not that it should or shouldn't, I don't know. I'm just reporting what I observed. 

After using the target computer's BIOS setup to change the boot sequence (a Dell), it booted from the thumbdrive, though Debian-on-a-stick wouldn't mount the target computer's hard drive, certainly a significant issue, me-thinks. Any suggestions on why that didn't work? Specifically, for this forum, what could I do better in preparing the thumb drive for dd'ing a whole-disk disk image?


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