Making A Bootable Usb Drive For Mac

Many times you want to install Windows 10 on a Mac computer with the intention of running your favorite windows games, applications which don’t have a version for Mac OS, or solve some Windows issue especially for boot-related issues. Regardless of the causes, you need to first create a Windows 10 bootable USB from ISO on Mac OS. As a Mac users, you might know that Apple provides an custom-tailored solution called Bootcamp to help create a Windows bootable USB. But in fact, creating Windows bootable USB on Mac isn’t as straightforward as you think, in the creating process, naturally there will be a variety of problems.

Connect the external drive to your Mac, and make a note of the external drive's name as it appears within macOS. This is important, as using the wrong name could lead to another connected drive. If you want to use your USB stick with an Apple Mac, you will need to restart or power-on the Mac with the USB stick inserted while the Option/alt (⌥) key is pressed. This will launch Apple’s ‘Startup Manager’ which shows bootable devices connected to the machine.

We've also received lots of emails from readers asking why Bootcamp wouldn’t allow me to use Windows 10, despite the fact that my laptop is compatible. BootCamp doesn't always work well, especially in creating Windows 10 bootable USB installation media, the most common errors you will encounter: 'failed to load BOOTMGR' or 'not Enough Space'. Another reason is Apple has already stripped the ability to make Windows 10 bootable USB in last release of Mac OS, and it is a problem because that require uses other tools. It’s believed that each software has its own pros and cons, Boot Camp is no exception. But it’s still a outstanding tool which is developed by Apple, so, this article will give priority to Boot Camp and also shows 4 intuitive approach to help you make a Windows 10 bootable USB on mac with or without Boot Cam Assistant.

How to create a bootable macOS Mojave installer drive Put the macOS Mojave installer on an external USB thumb drive or hard drive and use it to install the operating system on a Mac. Make Windows Bootable USB Mac with PassFab 4WinKey. Thinking about how do I create a.

Method #1: Create A Bootable Windows 10/8/7 USB on Mac with Bootcamp

As a dual-boot booting tool, Boot Camp Assistant is highly regarded in the field of creating Windows 7/8/10 bootable USB since it was released, it provides the ability to download drivers, re-partition, and add new partition on your Mac. But sometimes you will find bootcamp tool doesn't allow any customization of the process. Before using it, you need to know that your USB installation media will be formatted as FAT32 file system, which can’t store files larger than 4 GB. Let’s see how it works.

Step 1. First of all, make sure you’ve download a Windows 10, or Win7, 8 ISO image file on your Mac computer. Then you need to move ISO file to your USB drive by using Boot Cam.

Step 2. Now, insert your USB dive with at least 8GB to your Mac computer, make sure you’ve created a copy for your important file because your USB will be formatted.

Step 3. Launch the Boot Cam Assistant from Utilities, then check the two options: Create a Windows installation disk and Install Windows 7 or later version. Click Continue to proceed.

Making A Bootable Usb Drive For Mac

Step 4. when you go to this step, Boot Cam Assistant will detect and locate your ISO image file, click choose button to find and import the right one, and click continue. It may take some times to format your USB, please wait.

Step 5. When the process is complete, you will see that your USB drive will be renamed as WINNSTALL, this is your windows 10 bootable USB tool! Click Quit to close the app and then Eject the USB drive.

That's it! You’ve successfully made a bootable USB drive with Windows 10 OS, and you can use it to configure new Windows 10 PCs from scratch.

Method #2: Create A Bootable Windows 10 USB On Mac with PassCue for ISO

Making a bootable USB is not as easy as copying ISO file to your USB drive,it requires professional ISO writing tool to burn it to USB drive instead of copying. For Mac users, There may have many chance to encounter some unknown errors when using Bootcamp to create a Windows 10 USB disk on Mac, like Bootcamp failed to load bootmgr, not recognizing iso or usb not enough space,etc. So you desperately need to find a way to create bootable USB without Bootcamp.

Fortunately, PassCue for ISO is a wonderful tool which can burn, create, edit and extract ISO files from any files, folders and operating system files. It has been adopted on a large scale by various users and widely recommended. It provides 5 key functions for your ISO operations including: Burn ISO, Extract ISO, Edit ISO, Create ISO and copy disc, it works very effectively in both Windows and Mac OS.

Step 1. Get the software downloaded from above button and install it on your Mac with proper step instructions. Launch the tool with admin privileges to enable every kind of possible authorities. Once the tool screen turns up, you should see there are five functions including Burn, Extract, Cretae, Edit and Copy Disc. To make a Windows 10 bootable USB, then you need to choose the first option “Burn” and next.

Step 2. As you can see, you’re allowed to create a Windows 10 bootable disk with USB drive or DVD/CD, here, just insert your USB drive to your Mac, then import ISO file by clicking browse button. Select your file format from the 'System File' section as FAT, FAT 32, NTFS.

Step 3. In the partition style, it provide two mode to choose based on your ISO file: MBR or UEFI. If MBR won’t boot, then change UEFI mode to create again. When all settings are complete, click Burn button to begin, it will take 5 - 10 minutes to complete the burning process.

Step 4. When the burning is complete, you can open your USB drive and see there are many boot files inside it. Take out of your USB drive and try to install Windows OS on your other computers.

As you can see, this method is so easy and safe! Never damages your ISO file. If you don’t find the method satisfactory and have plans to try out a different approach, you are most welcome to do so.

Part 3 : Create A Windows 10 Bootable USB on Mac without Bootcamp

As we mentioned above, creating a bootable USB Windows 7/8/10 on mac OS isn’t as simple as you might think. You will need Terminal tool on Mac to perform some command. Before we start make sure you have an effective ISO file and have USB flash drive with not less than 4GB capacity. Here are the steps to be performed on a Mac to create a Windows 10 USB Bootable Installation Drive on mac.


Step 1. Connect your USB drive to your Mac.

Step 2. Open a Terminal (under Utilities)

Making A Bootable Usb Drive For MacMac

Step 3. Now you need to Run diskutil list and confirm the device node assigned to your USB flash media disk2.

Step 4. Type the following command.

hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o ~/path/to/windows-10-iso.img ~/path/to/windows-10-iso.iso

Step 5. Replace /path/to/downloaded.iso with the path to where the image file is located; for example, ./windows10.iso). This command will convert the ISO file to IMG format.

Bootable

Step 6. Type the following command to check the location of your USB drive:

Create A Bootable Drive Mac

diskutil list

Step 7. Next, you need to type the command to Unmount the USB drive, then replace /dev/diskX with the location of your USB drive.

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX

Step 8. Finally, run the following command to create Windows 10/8/7 bootable USB on Mac.

sudo dd if=/path/to/windows-10-iso.img of=/dev/rdiskX bs=1m

Step 9 . Then try to replace /path/to/windows-10-iso with the real filepath of the ISO file and /dev/diskX with the location of the USB drive. This command will take some time, and once it’s complete, you can eject the USB drive by this command: diskutil eject /dev/diskX

Once the process is complete, you can see the data will be copied and your USB will be bootable.

Part 4 : Create Bootable USB Windows 10 on Mac with UNetbootin

UNetbootin is free software and the latest release of new features in UNetbootin focuses on cross-platform technology that allows you create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without a CD. It can run on Mac, Windows and Linux. Now, I will show a detailed tutorial.

Step 1. Like other method 1, you can also need to check the path name of the USB drive. After you insert your USB to your Mac, open the Disk utility on Mac OS X, select the USB drive from the left panel and click Info button. Write down the USB name info for the next usage.

Step 2. Now, you need to download UNetbootin tool then install it on your Mac, launch it. And copy the app to the /Application folder. Select the Diskimage button and import your ISO image file.

Step 3. In the panel, select the USB drive in the Type option, and select your USB drive on UNetbootin. Click on the OK button and wait to the process end!

In my opintion, It’s easy to use and doesn’t damages your system. But there still some users reported that UNetbootin is not working. Good luck to you!

Related Articles

I needed to run a BIOS flash utility that was only available for DOS. To complicate matters, the server I needed to run it on doesn’t have a floppy or CD-ROM drive. I figured I’d hop on the Internet and download a bootable USB flash drive image. Right? Wrong.

I found a lot of instructions for how to make such an image if you already have a running Windows or Linux desktop, but they weren’t very helpful for me and my Mac. After some trial and error, I managed to create my own homemade bootable USB flash drive image. It’s available at http://www.mediafire.com/?aoa8u1k1fedf4yq if you just want a premade ready-to-download file.

If you want a custom version, or you don’t trust the one I’ve made – and who’d blame you? I’m some random stranger on the Internet! – here’s how you can make your own bootable image under OS X:

  1. There are a lot of steps, but they’re easy! I wanted to err on the side of being more detailed than necessary, rather than skipping “obvious” steps that might not be quite so easy for people who haven’t done this before.
Make bootable usb mac os
  1. Download VirtualBox. I used version 4.1.4. The version available to you today might look different but should work mostly the same way.
  2. Open the “VirtualBox-[some-long-number]-OSX.dmg” disk image.
  3. Double-click the “VirtualBox.mpkg” icon to run the installer.
  4. Click “Continue”.
  5. Click “Continue”.
  6. Click “Install”.
  7. Enter your password and click “Install Software”.
  8. When it’s finished copying files, etc., click “Close”.
  1. Download the FreeDOS “Base CD” called “fdbasecd.iso”. Note: the first mirror I tried to download from didn’t work. If that happens, look around on the other mirrors until you find one that does.
  2. Open your “Applications” folder and run the “VirtualBox” program.
  3. Click the “New” button to create a new virtual machine. This launches the “New Virtual Machine Wizard”. Click “Continue” to get past the introduction.
  4. Name your new VM something reasonable. I used “FreeDOS”, and whatever name you enter here will appear throughout all the following steps so you probably should, too.
  5. Set your “Operating System” to “Other”, and “Version” to “DOS”. (If you typed “FreeDOS” in the last step, this will already be done for you.) Continue.
  6. Leave the “Base Memory Size” slider at 32MB and continue.
  7. Make sure “Start-up Disk” is selected, choose “Create new hard disk”, and continue.
  8. Select “File type” of “VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image)” and continue.
  9. Select “Dynamically allocated” and continue.
  10. Keep the default “Location” of “FreeDOS”.
  11. Decision time: how big do you want to make your image? The full install of FreeDOS will take about 7MB, and you’ll want to leave a little room for your own files. On the other hand, the larger you make this image, the longer it’ll take to copy onto your USB flash drive. You certainly don’t want to make it so large that it won’t actually fit on your USB flash drive. An 8GB nearly-entirely-empty image will be worthless if you only have a 2GB drive. I splurged a little and made my image 32MB (by clicking in the “Size” textbox and typing “32MB”. I hate size sliders.). Click “Continue”.
  12. Click “Create”.
  13. Make sure your new “FreeDOS” virtual machine is highlighted on the left side of the VirtualBox window.
  14. On the right-hand side, look for the section labeled “Storage” and click on the word “Storage” in that title bar.
  15. Click the word “Empty” next to the CD-ROM icon.
  16. Under “Attributes”, click the CD-ROM icon to open a file chooser, select “Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file…”, and select the FreeDOS Base CD image you downloaded at the beginning. It’ll probably be in your “Downloads” folder. When you’ve selected it, click “Open”.
  17. Back on the “FreeDOS – Storage” window, click “OK”.

How To Make A Bootable Usb Drive For Mac On Windows

  1. Back on the main VirtualBox window, near the top, click “Start” to launch the virtual machine you just made.
  2. A note about VirtualBox: when you click the VM window or start typing, VirtualBox will “capture” your mouse cursor and keyboard so that all key presses will go straight to the VM and not your OS X desktop. To get them back, press the left [command] key on your keyboard.
  3. At the FreeDOS boot screen, press “1” and [return] to boot from the CD-ROM image.
  4. Hit [return] to “Install to harddisk”.
  5. Hit [return] to select English, or the up and down keyboard arrow keys to choose another language and then [return].
  6. Hit [return] to “Prepare the harddisk”.
  7. Hit [return] in the “XFDisk Options” window.
  8. Hit [return] to open the “Options” menu. “New Partition” will be selected. Hit [return] again. “Primary Partition” will be selected. Again, [return]. The maximum drive size should appear in the “Partition Size” box. If not, change that value to the largest number it will allow. Hit [return].
  9. Do you want to initialize the Partition Area? Yes. Hit [return].
  10. Do you want to initialize the whole Partition Area? Oh, sure. Press the left arrow key to select “YES”, then hit [return].
  11. Hit [return] to open the “Options” menu again. Use the arrow keys to scroll down to “Install Bootmanager” and hit [return].
  12. Press [F3] to leave XFDisk.
  13. Do you want to write the Partition Table? Yep. Press the left arrow to select “YES” and hit [return]. A “Writing Changes” window will open and a progress bar will scroll across to 100%.
  14. Hit [return] to reboot the virtual machine.
  15. This doesn’t actually seem to reboot the virtual machine. That’s OK. Press the left [command] key to give the mouse and keyboard back to OS X, then click the red “close window” button on the “FreeDOS [running]” window to shut it down. Choose “Power off the machine” and click “OK”.
  16. Back at the main VirtualBox window, click “Start” to re-launch the VM.
  17. Press “1” and [return] to “Continue to boot FreeDOS from CD-ROM”, just like you did before.
  18. Press [return] to select “Install to harddisk” again. This will take you to a different part of the installation process this time.
  19. Select your language and hit [return].
  20. Make sure “Yes” is selected, and hit [return] to let FreeDOS format your virtual disk image.
  21. Proceed with format? Type “YES” and hit [return]. The format process will probably finish too quickly for you to actually watch it.
  22. Now you should be at the “FreeDOS 1.0 Final Distribution” screen with “Continue with FreeDOS installation” already selected. Hit [return] to start the installer.
  23. Make sure “1) Start installation of FreeDOS 1.0 Final” is selected and hit [return].
  24. You’ll see the GNU General Public License, version 2 text. Follow that link and read it sometime; it’s pretty brilliant. Hit [return] to accept it.
  25. Ready to install the FreeDOS software? You bet. Hit [return].
  26. Hit [return] to accep the default installation location.
  27. “YES”, the above directories are correct. Hit [return].
  28. Hit [return] again to accept the selection of programs to install.
  29. Proceed with installation? Yes. Hit [return].
  30. Watch in amazement and how quickly the OS is copied over to your virtual disk image. Hit [return] to continue when it’s done.
  31. The VM will reboot. At the boot screen, press “h” and [return] to boot your new disk image. In a few seconds, you’ll see an old familiar “C:” prompt.
  32. Press the left [command] key to release your keyboard and mouse again, then click the red “close window” icon to shut down the VM. Make sure “Power off the machine” is selected and click “OK”.
  1. Open a Terminal.app window by clicking the Finder icon in your dock, then “Applications”, then opening the “Utilies” folder, then double-clicking “Terminal”.
  2. Copy this command, paste it into the terminal window, then hit [return]:

This will turn your VirtualBox disk image file into a “raw” image file on your desktop named “freedos.img”. It won’t alter your original disk image in any way, so if you accidentally delete or badly damage your “raw” image, you can re-run this command to get a fresh, new one.

Creating A Bootable Usb For Mac

  1. Plug your USB flash drive into your Mac.
  2. If your Mac can’t the drive, a new dialog window will open saying “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.” Follow these instructions:

    1. Click “Ignore”.
    2. Go back into your terminal window and run this command:

    3. You’ll see a list of disk devices (like “/dev/disk2”), their contents, and their sizes. Look for the one you think is your USB flash drive. Run this command to make sure, after replacing “/dev/disk2” with the actual name of the device you picked in the last step.

    Make sure the “Device / Media Name:” and “Total Size:” fields look right. If not, look at the output of diskutil list again to pick another likely candidate and repeat the step until you’re sure you’ve picked the correct drive to complete eradicate, erase, destroy, and otherwise render completely 100% unrecoverable. OS X will attempt to prevent you from overwriting the contents of drives that are currently in use – like, say, your main system disk – but don’t chance it. Remember the name of this drive!

  3. If your Mac did read the drive, it will have automatically mounted it and you’ll see its desktop icon. Follow these instructions:

    1. Go back into your terminal window and run this command:

    2. Look for the drive name in the output of that command. It will have the same name as the desktop icon.

    3. Look for the name of the disk device (like “/dev/disk2”) for that drive and remember it (with the same warnings as in the section above that you got to skip).
    4. Unmount the drive by running this command:

    5. This is not the same as dragging the drive into the trash, so don’t attempt to eject it that way.

Windows Bootable Usb On Mac

  1. Go back to your terminal window.
  2. Run these commands, but substitute “/dev/fakediskname” with the device name you discovered on the previous section:

  3. After the last command finishes, OS X will automatically mount your USB flash drive and you’ll see a new “FREEDOS” drive icon on your desktop.

  1. Drag your BIOS flasher utility, game, or other program onto the “FREEDOS” icon to copy it onto the USB flash drive.
  2. When finished, drag the “FREEDOS” drive icon onto the trashcan to unmount it.
  1. You’re finished. Use your USB flash drive to update your computer’s BIOS, play old DOS games, or do whatever else you had in mind.
  2. Keep the “freedos.img” file around. If you ever need it again, start over from the “Prepare your USB flash drive” section which is entirely self-contained. That is, it doesn’t require any software that doesn’t come pre-installed on a Mac, so even if you’ve uninstalled VirtualBox you can still re-use your handy drive image.