I am on OS X and have a Windows 8 Consumer Preview x64 image. My computer doesn’t have a CD drive (MacBook Air). I have a 4 GB USB drive. I want to restore that image to the USB drive. There are many tools to do that on Windows, but I can’t finger out how to do it in OS X. Please note that I can’t run a VM, as my Air is a limited use machine.
What I’ve tried:
- Simply restore to USB.
- Convert the image to img and use
dd
.
These don’t work.
How do I go about doing this?
EDIT: Ok, everyone, really sorry for the confusion. I am new here.
To clear my motive, I am trying to create a bootable USB Windows 8 installer to install Windows 8 Consumer Preview (which apparently requires a product key, something I don’t have) so that I can use it later to install Windows 8 CP on my Mac Book Air. Using Bootcamp, according to what I have read and tried, is not an option. As suggested, I tried using Boot Camp Utility to prepare the USB drive, but unfortunately, that simply isn’t working and I can’t troubleshoot it.
Best Answer
Prepare the USB key
We’re going to wipe the partition structure on the USB key. WARNING! THIS WILL DESTROY ALL DATA ON THE KEY!
Open up Disk Utility (it’s in /Applications/Utilities/).
Now do the following:
You will get a confirmation dialog appear ensuring you really want to delete all data on the key, choose Partition.
Once it’s completed you can quit out of Disk Utility.
The purpose of doing this is mainly to ensure that the USB key is in a consistent known state and also to ensure that any volumes are not mounted by OS X. It is not required and you can skip it if you’d rather just unmount the volumes yourself.
Preparing the ISO image
Now that our USB key is ready, we need to get our .iso image into a format that we can copy to it. Open up a Terminal (it too is in /Application/Utilities, and I’ll assume you know how to use the terminal)
Now, convert the image from a ISO to a Read/Write Universal Disk Image Format (or UDRW). Here I’m using the xbmc live repack ISO, but you can use anything else that’s an ISO file.
Once completed this will create the .img file. The hdiutil function likes to append a .dmg suffix to the file so it will probably end up .img.dmg after conversion.
Copy the image to the USB key
We’re finally here. The easy part, actually copying the image to the USB key.
First run diskutil list to get a listing of the disks in your machine so you can identify the USB key. It will look like this:
Here mine’s /dev/disk1.
We want to use the RAW disk device so that our copy will happen much faster because the RAW disk device provides unbuffered access to the device (See this Apple mailing list post for more info). This is accomplished by simply prepending ‘r’ to the device so that /dev/disk1 is going to become /dev/rdisk1
Next we use the dd command to copy the image over.
On the command line we specify the Input File using if= and the Output File using of= and dd will copy the data from input to output, block by block.
Once it’s completed you can exit Terminal and remove the USB key from your OS X machine, it should now be able to bootup your ISO on another machine.
NOTE: I wish I could take a credit for this, but I can't, here is the source.