4.5. Creating a bootable USB device on macOS

Procedure

1. Connect the USB flash drive to the system.

2. Identify the device path with the diskutil list command. The device path has the format of /dev/disknumber, where number is the number of the disk. The disks are numbered starting at zero (0). Typically, disk0 is the OS X recovery disk, and disk1 is the main OS X installation. In the following example, the USB device is disk2:

   $ diskutil list
   /dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         400.0 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:          Apple_CoreStorage                         98.8 GB    disk0s4
   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s5
   /dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS YosemiteHD             *399.6 GB   disk1
   Logical Volume on disk0s1
   8A142795-8036-48DF-9FC5-84506DFBB7B2
   Unlocked Encrypted
   /dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *8.1 GB     disk2
   1:               Windows_NTFS SanDisk USB             8.1 GB     disk2s1

3. Identify your USB flash drive by comparing the NAME, TYPE and SIZE columns to your flash drive. For example, the NAME should be the title of the flash drive icon in the Finder tool. You can also compare these values to those in the information panel of the flash drive.

4. Unmount the flash drive’s file system volumes:

   $ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disknumber
   Unmount of all volumes on disknumber was successful

   When the command completes, the icon for the flash drive disappears from your desktop. If the icon does not disappear, you may have selected the wrong disk. Attempting to unmount the system disk accidentally returns a failed to unmount error.

5. Write the ISO image to the flash drive. macOS provides both a block (/dev/disk*) and character device (/dev/rdisk*) file for each storage device. Writing an image to the /dev/rdisknumber character device is faster than writing to the /dev/disknumber block device. For example, to write the /Users/user_name/Downloads/rhel-{ProductNumber}-x86_64-boot.iso file to the /dev/rdisk2 device, enter the following command:

   # sudo dd if=/Users/user_name/Downloads/rhel-{ProductNumber}-x86_64-boot.iso of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=512K status=progress

   • if= - Path to the installation image.
   • of= - The raw disk device (/dev/rdisknumber) representing the target disk.
   • bs=512K - Sets the block size to 512 KB for faster data transfer.
   • status=progress - Displays a progress indicator during the operation.
6. Wait for the dd command to finish writing the image to the device. The data transfer is complete when the # prompt appears. When the prompt is displayed, log out of the root account and unplug the USB drive. The USB drive is now ready to be used as a boot device.