Creating a bootable USB stick on macOS

This will cover how to write an Ubuntu ISO image to a USB drive on macOS.

Note: this process should work for all macOS 10.x verisons.

Requirements:

Ubuntu ISO image file: https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Utility to write to USB: UNetbootin https://unetbootin.github.io

Warning: writing the images to USB drives in this guide will remove any data on the target drive.

1 Format USB Drive

To make sure you can see your USB drive in the UNetbootin utility, we recommend a format of the USB to MS-DOS (FAT). You can use spotlight to find and run Disk Utility.
Select the USB drive and click on Erase.
Format to MS-DOS (FAT).


2 Download and Launch

After downloading the Unetbootin utility: https://unetbootin.github.io
Launch UNetbootin, this will require to accept a security prompt for running programs outside of the app store and then a password prompt to run.


3 Select Distro

Select the required distro to download and write to USB.  I've selected 'Ubuntu 18.04Live
x64'.

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4 Launch UNetbootin

Now you should be able to re-run the 'UNetbootin' utility and see the USB drive listed in the 'Drive' field.

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5 Write ISO to USB

Now click on 'OK' to proceed with a download and write to the USB drive.
Warning: This will overwrite the selected device, so the advice is to make sure this is the only USB drive plugged in.

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6 Download, write, complete

The next steps are automated. This will download and write to the USB drive.
Note: This may take time for the download.
After this process is complete, you will have a bootable recovery USB drive.

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