Make a bootable USB drive from .img in Mac OS X
Archived
Written in February 2012. Kept as it was, so versions, links and details may be out of date.
I needed to make a USB bootable drive of pfSense and being an OS X newb, had to Google it. Here’s what I found. Run these commands from Terminal.
diskutil listFind your USB drive in the list, mine was /dev/disk2. Unmount the drive if it is currently mounted, umount /dev/disk2
Now, there’s two commands you can run, dd with /rdisk2 gave me 15.33 KB/s. dd with just /disk2 only gave me 4.60 KB/s.
sudo dd if=/Users/shane/Downloads/pfSense-memstick-2.0.1-RELEASE-i386.img of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1mChange input file and output file as necessary. If /dev/rdisk does not work for some reason just use of=/dev/disk2
When using rdisk2 my flash drive was constantly flashing with activity, with just disk2 it would flash for a few seconds followed by a few minutes of no activity. Use /dev/rdiskN where N is your USB drive.