Beginning in Lion (10.7), there's a new feature in Mac OS X to assist you if things go really wrong, since you can't boot from disk anymore. This new feature is called, and it gives you a way to start 'from scratch' if you need to rebuild your Mac. There are a couple of methods for doing this, which both lead to the same place: A (8GB or larger), safely stashed in a drawer, which has a bootable OS on it, as well as an installer to put that OS on a hard drive. First up is the 'official' method, a utility introduced with Mavericks, called.
Make a bootable USB flash drive to run & repair Mac OS X – Omar, To gain access to Disk Utility you can either boot to the Mac OS X DVD or make another partition on the USB/Firewire drive (assuming it is large enough) with a copy of the OS X disc itself.
This works with Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks, all the versions of Mac OS that were distributed via the Mac App Store. Using this method is pretty straightforward: the Recovery Disk Assistant, plug in that, and follow the prompts. After a little while you will have a bootable backup of your OS. An alternate method that dates back to the release of Lion is, formerly known as Lion Disk Maker. This is a nice wrapper for a set of Applescripts that will also create a USB drive to back up from. This was the nicest option before Apple built a utility of its own.
It works much the same way as Apple's too, launch the app and follow the prompts and you end up with a USB drive you can boot from. Keep in mind you can't install an older OS than your computer shipped with, but otherwise to use this newly minted installer all you have to do is plug in the USB drive, and hold down the Option key while the machine boots.
This will give you your boot drive options, then choose the USB stick and you're all set.
Here are some instructions from that will put the ISO onto the flash drive with a Mac. They won't make it bootable though. Open a Terminal (under Utilities). Run diskutil list and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g., /dev/disk2). Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk N (replace N with the disk number from the last command; in the previous example, N would be 2). Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.iso of=/dev/disk N bs=1m (replace /path/to/downloaded.iso with the path where the image file is located; for example,./windows7.iso). Run diskutil eject /dev/disk N, and remove your flash media when the command completes (this can take a few hours on slower drives) Now.
After you read all that, on the Gizmodo page it says that if you want to make it bootable you should use a utility called Live USB helper they link to (which isn't there any more) and use a Mac mounting tool (which isn't there either!) to force the ISO to mount on the Mac so you can copy the files over. That article may prove useful, but probably not. I can find other copies of Live USB helper out there, but they are all Windows executables. One method that will work is to swap the hard drive out of the PC and into the Mac. Put your Windows 7 installation disc into the Mac optical drive, and install Windows 7 on that drive.
Once it is up and running (don't worry about drivers yet), follow these steps. Run Command Prompt as administrator. Type to Command Prompt:%windir% System32 Sysprep Sysprep.exe, and hit Enter. In sysprep dialog that opens, choose “System Cleanup Action” as “Enter System Out-of-Box-Experience (OOBE)”, select “Generalize”, and select “Shutdown Options” as “Shutdown”. Click “OK”.
Sysprep generalizes now your Windows 7 setup and shuts down your computer. Do not run any other programs during this phase!. Remove the drive from your Mac. Put it back into the PC. Boot the PC from sysprep generalized hard disk. You will notice Windows booting as if it was the first boot after installation, installing default and updating registry. One or two reboots are needed, depending on your system specifications.
When Windows finally boots up, you will need to enter all information as if this really was a new, fresh installation All that is from, but it applies in this situation a well, since you would be moving a Windows 7 installation from one computer to another. Considering that trying to make a Windows bootable USB stick with a Mac requires tools that either don't exist any more or are not being developed any more.
This second method will most likely prove more dependable. Assuming you have burnt your Windows CD into a ISO file with the tools like: 1. Jump into a folder here 2.
Get the latest version of zip archive with the keyword 'mac' in the filename. Download and open it up on your Mac OS X desktop. On Unetbootin interface, choose Diskimage-ISO and then select the Windows ISO file on your local hard drive. Select the right USB Drive and then click OK to start writing ISO data onto your USB drive.
Once done, you're ready to boot your computer with this bootable USB drive, like a DVD installation disk. You could also use on your Mac and install Windows quickly, then use Windows to create the media for the PC. You just need to allow windows to read from the USB port. Microsoft published for Internet Explorer testing purposes, but you can also use them to create a bootable USB stick. To allow Windows to read from the USB port you'll need to install the.
Then you can enable the USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller in the virtual machine's settings (Ports - USB). Then when you insert the USB stick, it will probably first be detected by OS X, and since only one OS at a time can acces the port, you should eject it in OS X. Then it should automatically show up in Windows. If it's not, try to click the USB cable connection icon at the right bottom in the virtual machine. The USB port should be listed there and when you click it it should be mounted.
Then you can use a tool such as to create a bootable USB stick. As none of the answers I found on the internet worked for me, here are the steps that I ended up following. First of all, brief description of my setup:. I want to install Windows 7 (32-bit) on a PC (not on a Mac) using a USB removable media (8GB). I have an ISO image of the installation DVD.
I want to prepare the USB media on my Mac (OS X 10.10 Yosemite). my MacBook Pro only has USB 3.0 ports What I tried:. the typical suggestion of using hdiutil to convert ISO to UDRW IMG and then using dd to copy it to the USB. While I did not encounter any errors, the resulting USB media was not bootable. using UNetbootin to create the media (supplying Windows installer ISO as custom ISO). While I did not encounter any errors and the resulting USB media seemed to be bootable, it just crashed during boot (started to boot then halted the system, no error). using Windows inside VirtualBox to write to the USB stick did not work either, as VirtualBox does not support USB 3.0 yet (I even updated by VirtualBox to 5.0.0 RC1 but still no luck.
Maybe newer versions will work) SOLUTION As none of the above worked, I ended up first and then used that Ubuntu installation (it has GRUB2!).