This fails the entire idea of having a portable Linux USB, right? The Linux USB you created won’t boot on other systems because its EFI files are on the ESP partitions of the system which was used to install Linux on USB.The system you used for installing Linux on USB may not boot and end up with grub error if you don’t have the Linux USB plugged in.This means that the Linux installed on the external USB will be the last one to update and control the bootloader. Even if you choose to install bootloader on the external USB, it doesn’t work if hard disk already has an ESP partition While installing Linux, even if you choose the USB as the destination for bootloader, the existing ESP partition is still used for placing the EFI file for the new distribution. A system can only have one active ESP partition at a time and it causes issues. The one major problem with this setup is bootloader installation on UEFI systems.

You can like our Facebook page, share this post with your friends, and select our affiliate links for your purchases on or Newegg.The available tutorials on the internet miss the most crucial part: the bootloader. Support PCstepsĭo you want to support PCsteps, so we can post high quality articles throughout the week? If anything on the guide didn't work as described, and you weren't able to create a Linux Live USB in Mac OS X, leave us a comment. Did you have any trouble creating a Linux Live USB in Mac OS X? We now have a Linux Live USB, to install Linux on a Windows PC, or on our Mac. The 1006MB ISO was transferred to the USB in less than 5,2 seconds, averaging 194MB/sec.įinally, we eject the USB thumb drive with: diskutil eject /dev/disk If we use a fast USB 3.0 drive on a USB 3.0 capable Mac, the procedure will be lightning fast. Nothing will show on the terminal as we are typing we just enter the password and press Enter. DMG extension, so we have to include this too.Īlso, using /dev/rdisk instead of /dev/disk may be faster, but both will work.Īfter the sudo command, we need to enter our user account password. We might have converted the ISO to IMG, but Mac OS X added a. We make sure it doesn't contain any useful files, because they will be deleted, and then run: diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskįinally, we are ready to set the procedure in motion. Next thing, we need to unmount the drive. We connect the thumb drive to our Mac and run the diskutil command to see the device node assigned to our flash drive. For most Linux distributions, a 4GB USB thumb drive will be enough.

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