How to Make Bootable Debian USB on Mac

bootabledebianmacintoshusb

Their approach
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/MacBookAir/3-2
does not work(everything goes fine but usb does not become bootable).
It also seems seems several years old and outdated. Other distos have large amouts of troubleshooting this issue, but not debian. Any advice how can I debug why my usb did not becamse Debian bootable after those procedures.

My steps were:

1)erase usb drive using disk utils and create FAT partition(i tried also exFAT and OSX Extended).

2) downloaded the iso and converted it to img:

hdiutil convert debian-8.4.0-i386-DVD-1.iso -format UDRW -o debian-8.4.0-i386-DVD-1.img

and renaming the result to remove the ".img" from name. I also tried to us UDTO instead of UDRW.

3) finding my usb location using diskutil list, it was /dev/disk2

4) unmounting the usb: diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

5) dding the image: sudo dd if=debian-8.4.0-i386-DVD-1.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m

what took several hours. The result was the expected message that usb could not be read.

6) ejecting the usb with: diskutil eject /dev/disk2

The result was that the usb was not bootable – in the loading screen pressing alt button – the usb does not show.

Best Answer

Use unetbootin : https://unetbootin.github.io/. Here is a tutorial for ubuntu but you can also use it for debian just change the image :http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-mac-osx

Related Solutions

Debian – How to build a live Debian CD/USB in Windows, bootable in EFI mode

What do you want from that LiveCD? Maybe a DVD that boots for you is fine for that if it lends you a shell (try Ctrl-Alt-F2/F3/...) and provides the tools needed.

Try getting to the console, chrooting into the system installed (but lacking the bootloader) and running grub-install (with no additional arguments) by hand to see the error message. Did you mount ESP into /boot/efi/?

Rod's books page on the topic is also highly recommended.

How exactly did you write the ISO to the pendrive? dd(1) or a win32 equivalent like SUSE Image Writer should do fine.

Shameless plug: I have implemented UEFI support in ALT Linux, and if our regular builds work for you then I can probably translate/explain the relevant bits of mkimage-profiles documentation so you can prepare the derivative needed (or use it to prepare a bootable root so that you can work on your Debian installation with comfort). Didn't get around to testing wheezy's release UEFI behaviour but d-i beta4 had some troubles with bootloader installation as well.

Linux – How to Logically Eject and Reattach a USB Device

Many answers found on the Internet (including those in TNW's comment) rely on /sys/bus/usb/devices/2-2/power/level or /sys/bus/usb/devices/2-2/power/control which are both deprecated since 2.6.something kernel. For newer kernels, the suggested procedure is to unbind and rebind its driver, which usually results in a power cycle:

# Find out which driver to unbind
tree /sys/bus/usb/devices/2-2.1 | grep driver
|-- driver -> ../../../../../../bus/usb/drivers/whatever

# Unbind the driver
echo 2-2.1 > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/whatever/unbind

# Rebind the driver
echo 2-2.1 > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/whatever/bind

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