Helpful info to add to debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb for Mac OSX

[Jason TributeCPS <jason@tributecps.com>]

Hello, Hopefully you can add this to debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb page to help other users on Mac OSX write an image to a flash drive.

Below is the addition proposal to the webpage

Mac OSX Note: Prior to issuing cp or dd commands to a device, you must unmount partitions on the drive to avoid Permissions and Resource Busy busy errors from the system.

diskutil umount /dev/disk<disk number>s*  

• <disk number> is the device number matching the USB FLASH Drive 

Below is the section of the webpage

How do I write a CD/DVD/BD image to a USB flash drive?

Several of the Debian and Debian Live images, notably all i386, amd64 and arm64 images, are created using the isohybrid technology, which means that they may be used in two different ways:

• They may be written to CD/DVD/BD and used as normal for CD/DVD/BD booting.
• They may be written to USB flash drives, bootable directly from the BIOS / EFI firmware of most PCs.

On a Linux machine, simply use the cp command, to copy an image to a USB flash drive:

cp <file> <device>

Alternatively you can also use dd:

dd if=<file> of=<device> bs=4M; sync

where:

• <file> is the name of the input image, e.g. netinst.iso
• <device> is the device matching the USB flash drive, e.g. /dev/sda, /dev/sdb. Be careful to make sure you have the right device name, as this command is capable of writing over your hard disk just as easily if you get the wrong one!
• bs=4M tells dd to read/write in 4 megabyte chunks for better performance; the default is 512 bytes, which will be much slower
• The sync is to make sure that all the writes are flushed out before the command returns.

Thank you,

Jason March - jason@tributecps.com 

Tribute CPS

818.927.1284

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