So from time to time it is necessary to put an iso onto a usb thumb drive… Back in the day it was simple to just burn it to a blank disc but many servers and computers don’t come with dvd/cd drives anymore. I don’t see this as a bad thing, certainly we almost never use our CD/DVD/BLU-RAY drives anymore so why carry them around?

Here is how to do it in terminal, still the cleanest way using a Mac Terminal window.

• First run diskutil list
• then insert your usb stick
• and run diskutil list again to see the disk node (e.g. /dev/disk2).
• Now run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
• and do sudo dd if=/path-to.iso of=/dev/rdiskN bs=1m
• When finished diskutil eject /dev/diskN

Thats about it! Pretty simple really 🙂