When the flashing is complete, macOS will pop up a warning that says “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.” This is expected, but do not click initialize. It may take a couple of minutes, depending on the size of your distro’s ISO file.Ħ. Click the “Flash!” button to start the writing process.ĥ. Click “Select Drive” and select the USB drive you just formatted.Ĥ. Open Etcher and click “Select Image.” Navigate to your ISO in the pop-up Finder window and select it.ģ. Now that the disk is properly formatted, we will write the Linux Live USB to the drive using Etcher.Ģ. If multiple attempts fail, try erasing the disk in Terminal with the diskutil command. When the format completes, click “Done.” If the formatting is not successful, you may need to retry the operation. Click the “Erase” button to format the drive. The drive will have the component name, while the volume will have a user-applied name.Ħ. If you do not see the “Scheme” option, make sure you have selected the drive in the sidebar rather than the volume underneath it. Set “Format” to “MS-DOS (FAT)” and “Scheme” to “GUID Partition Map” as seen in the screenshot. Click the “Erase” button at the top of the Disk Utility window.ĥ. Selecting the wrong drive will lead to data loss.Ĥ.

Insert your USB drive and open Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app).ģ. The process should be the same regardless of distro.Ģ. In this example we will be using Ubuntu Bionic Beaver. Download the disk image (typically an ISO) for the distro you want to install. That would make it functionally inaccessible to us.ġ.

If we do not, Startup Manager will not be able to detect the USB.

Creating a Linux Live USB in macOS requires us to format the USB with a specific partition table.

Create bootable usb linux on mac