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I've searched the web for hours trying to find out the following:

I am having problems with Nautilis. I want to create a Ubuntu Boot-USB for PC's. However I own a PC with Ubuntu 13.04 (the Disk manager is broken) and a Mac. How can I get the ISO extracted to the USB to boot on my PC?

I don't want Windows, and I don't want to boot Ubuntu on my Mac - simple.

FYI - The problem was, in fact, the DELL PC that this bootable USB was being used on. UNetBootin was perfectly fine.

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3 Answers 3

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I would suggest using a command line utility, dd.

  1. Attach the USB that you intend to use, note that this process will fully wipe it.
  2. List the drives/partitions with diskutil list (find the /dev/disk#)
  3. Run dd if=/Users/USERNAME/Downloads/ubuntu-13.04x64.iso of=/dev/disk# bs=1M

Once that appears to be done, type sync and make sure your drive is written to. That should be all you need, just be sure to not mistype anything - since you could kill your main drive by overwriting sectors.

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  • @user238206 - Not sure what Nautilus has to do with you wanting to make a bootable drive for PC... In any case, dd is a bit-for-bit copy, so it's slow. If that doesn't work, then you probably have something else wrong - since unetbootin doesn't work and this doesn't. I would suggest giving it a bit longer before cutting it off. Or booting a live ubuntu disk (you could do this in virtualbox) and running dd or run the make a bootable usb option.
    – nerdwaller
    Jul 15, 2013 at 13:14
  • If Nautilus wasn't broken, I could quickly create a ubuntu live disk from my ubuntu installation. Nevertheless, I can try the dd method a second time, surely this could take hours? When previously on Nautilus (<= 12.*) it took about 5-10 minutes max.
    – Ash
    Jul 15, 2013 at 13:19
  • One more problem I have found is When I use the Disk Util to erase the flash drive and create a bootable partition using the FAT32 filesystem, using the dd command will then reset the filesystem to being the Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
    – Ash
    Jul 15, 2013 at 13:34
  • dd doesn't do formatting in the traditional sense, it will bit-for-bit copy the iso - so whatever the ISO is, the flash drive will be also. You don't need to format it first nor make anything bootable using DD, since DD will overwrite whatever is on the drive on a sector level. It may take longer than 10mins using the bs=1M option (but you can usually leave it out for live discs), but not hours - no. You could always install another DE and create a bootable USB from there, or as I said before, run a Virtualbox.
    – nerdwaller
    Jul 15, 2013 at 14:10
  • It irritates me that something so simple, requires a rather perplexed solution, Virtualbox or other Desktop Environment with the ability to create live disks, it's absurd. I guess I will figure this out one way or another I refuse to spend hours pissing about when it's a very very simple thing i want to do...
    – Ash
    Jul 15, 2013 at 14:38
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Ubuntu provides step by step instructions on how to accomplish this

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-mac-osx

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by UNetbootin, you can make flash disks bootable in linux distros

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    That didn't seem to work, sadly when I attempt to boot the usb it says 'no boot device rarara'. It seemed promising at first, but no idea.
    – Ash
    Jul 15, 2013 at 11:22
  • I had the same problem.
    – Joshua Frank
    Sep 29, 2014 at 20:13

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