Creating a bootable USB installation drive on a Mac

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Create a bootable USB drive that you can use to install the ISO image on a bare metal server.

Before you begin

Download the bare metal server ISO from Passport Advantage®.
Important: To configure a bare metal server, you must use the ISO from Passport Advantage. Other ISO images are not compatible.

Procedure

  1. Insert the USB drive into a Mac system.
  2. Open the Terminal application.
  3. Determine which drive is the USB drive by issuing the list command:
    $ diskutil list
  4. Partition the USB drive. In the example above, /dev/disk2 is the USB device. In the command below, replace <USB-device-path> with the path to your USB device.
    $ diskutil partitionDisk <USB-device-path> 1 "Free Space" "unused" "100%"
  5. Copy the bare metal server ISO to the USB drive:
    $ sudo dd if=<path-to-ISO-file> of=<USB-RAW-device-path> bs=1m
    Example:
    sudo dd if=/Users/jesse/Downloads/isrn-7.0.1_release-20230802_production.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m

    At the prompt, enter your local Mac system password to create the ISO. To view the status, press CTRL-T.

    When the copy operation finishes, a message that is similar to the following output is displayed:
    The following message indicates that the Mac cannot read the image by default.


  6. Verify that the ISO is bootable by completing the following steps:
    1. Install Brew by issuing the following command in the Terminal:
      /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)
    2. Install QEMU:
      brew install qemu
    3. Start a virtual console. Replace /dev/disk2 with the device ID for your bootable USB:
      sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024  -usb /dev/disk2
    4. Start QEMU by selecting the QEMU icon in the Mac system menu bar:


    5. Click the icon:
    6. Click Enter. After a few minutes, the following screen is displayed to confirm that the bootable USB is capable of installing the OS, but doesn't have enough resources on the current virtual instance because it is looking at your Mac's resources.
    7. Exit the QEMU window. Enter Ctrl + Alt + G.
    8. Eject the USB from your Mac:
      diskutil eject /dev/disk2