Since 10.7, the Disk Utility in OSX has taken a steep dive in quality. It used to be a great tool that (imo) made OSX slightly nicer than Windows for working with images and partitioning.
But as of 10.7 and higher, the Disk Utility seems to not be able to copy ISOs back to disks. This drives me crazy. Apple in all their Appleish fashion, has really crippled the software.
So a way to use OSX Terminal to copy sector by sector ISO images to a partition is to use DD.
first take a look at installed disks:
OSX$ diskutil list /dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *128.0 GB disk0 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_HFS SSD 127.2 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3 /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk1 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1 2: Apple_HFS 400GB 499.8 GB disk1s2 /dev/disk2 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: Apple_partition_scheme *18.5 MB disk2 1: Apple_partition_map 32.3 KB disk2s1 2: Apple_HFS Flash Player 18.4 MB disk2s2 /dev/disk4 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *2.0 GB disk4 /dev/disk5 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *80.0 GB disk5 1: 0xDE 32.9 MB disk5s1 2: Windows_NTFS 79.9 GB disk5s2
This gives you a list of all the disks in the system.
First you want to soft unmount the disk that you want to use. Lets use the 80GB SATA drive.. Disk5
OSX$ diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk5 Unmount of all volumes on disk5 was successful
Now, Lets say I’ve got an ISO called IWK.iso that has a bootable nix distro on it.
All I have to do is use DD to copy the contents over
a quick
sudo dd if=./iwk.iso of=/dev/disk5
will allow you to get the contents copied over.
Be warned, this could take a while and there is NO progress bar 🙂