How can I burn an ISO to USB without using the command line?

This is a terrible terrible answer.

The most common use case for an ISO is a bootable image (linux or bsd), which requires a bit-for-bit copy of the internal file system. Just mounting the ISO and copying the files onto an HFS-formatted USB stick will not work.

jlevinson wrote:

I don't see it. High Sierra 10.13.2 gives me this:

Which OS are you using? If you click on the "Burn Disc in" list can you change it to the USB drive?

I believe that will only work with an optical disk. Since you don't have one, it doesn't give you the option to burn.

El Capitan removed the ability to burn ISO to disk in the Disk Utility app

I don't know where you got that ideal. Just Control (right) - click on the .iso file and select Burn Disc Image"xxxx" to Disc... from the contextual menu.

It is recommended that in boring a video DVD one burn at the slowest speed possible to get the more error free disc.

You don't "burn" a USB drive, you copy files onto it. Burning is for optical media.

Double-click the .iso and it should mount. Then copy the files from it onto the USB stick.

Etcher is beautiful! Thanks for pointing this one out.

In my case, I'm on a Mac and am trying to create a bootable Windows USB to repair a friend's laptop (all jokes welcome!). When I tried doing this in Etcher, it actually directed me to use Rufus, which worked great for me, but it's a Windows app, so you need to have Bootcamp/Parallels, or an actual Windows machine at hand.

Thanks for the link. I spent a lot of time finding a solution and Etcher pointed me in the right direction!

This is over a year late, but it might help someone else in the same boat:

Did you format the target USB in Fat32 with Master Boot Record? If you formatted it for a Mac, copied your windows installer to it, and then tried to boot a PC with it, it's gonna fail.

Since we're being pedantic AND nerdy AND need to get this done AND already have a Windows Install image on .ISO, just download VirtualBox, set up a Windows VM with it and the .iso, then use that to download and use Microsoft's own ISO to USB tool and be done with it. Or Rufus. Or ISOtoUSB. Whatever...

True, I don't have an optical drive (though I am planning on buying one and hope I can burn to DVD using it). However, this conversation never made it clear as to what the "USB drive" actually was. Did the OP mean an external DVD drive or did he mean a USB stick? Based on the answers, it could have been either. My original assumption was that he was talking about a stick, though I see where I could have gone wrong. Just another question without enough information to provide a satisfactory answer.

I don't see it. High Sierra 10.13.2 gives me this:

Which OS are you using? If you click on the "Burn Disc in" list can you change it to the USB drive?

Give up & try the Burn app?

http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html

Toast Titanium will do it to if you want to purchase an app. There may be others in the App Store.

Barney-15E wrote:

You don't "burn" a USB drive, you copy files onto it. Burning is for optical media.

Double-click the .iso and it should mount. Then copy the files from it onto the USB stick.

Good point Barney-15E, I read 'USB drive' & assumed Bebias was talking about a USB external optical drive, it probably isn't the case.

Bebias, please tell us what the purpose of the .iso is - if it is for making a bootable OS from Linux or similar Barney-15E's suggestion will fail to work. iso files contain the filesystem structure which is lost if you simply copy via the Finder, it breaks booting & features that require that partition structure. You would need to manually create the correct file system for it to work before copying.

You can use 'dd' to write the image in Terminal. The Raspberry Pi foundation has a reasonable explanation on that topic, replace the sdcard with your USB disk.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/mac.md

Disk Utility can still restore volumes on 10.11…

Disk Utility (El Capitan): Restore a disk image to a disk

It may not work with your .iso, I have had mixed success with certain .iso files, some really need to be burned to CD/ DVD to boot a computer.

Did you read all of my post and follow the link?

Drew Reece wrote:

Disk Utility can still restore volumes on 10.11…

Disk Utility (El Capitan): Restore a disk image to a disk

A disk image is effectively the same as an .iso, however I have not always been able to boot from an .iso written by Disk Utility - in fact some won't even write via Disk Utility.

The feature you want is called 'restore' it has always been called restore in Disk Utility on OS X. It has just been moved to a menu in 10.11.

Bebias wrote:

I still call it "burning" for a flash drive. If you want to be really technical, when writing to a flash memory, you ARE burning it. But that's being pedantic.

You may call it 'burning' if you like, however 'burning' concerns CD's & DVD's (optical media that is written by a light source).

The words you use cause you to look for something that doesn't exist - this is probably why you are getting frustrated, also if you want to be really pedantic, you are not 'burning' to a USB flash drive, you are 'writing' to it.

Let us know if that works for you.

Bebias wrote:

And as an aside, every time I open Disk Utility it hurts! Why can't I even resize so I can see the names of the volumes!!!

No idea, it's madness & downright hostile for anyone with multiple disks or monitors over 640x480. I suspect it is to make 10.12 look like an essential upgrade 🙂

I have previously changed the suffix to .dmg to make Disk Utility happier sometimes, however that is rarely successful, I can't recall the distro.

The 'convert' option in Disk Utility has some equivalence to the 'hdiutil' command, so if that is the 'convert command' you are are referring to that may also be handled by Disk Utility (I'm not in front of 10.11 at the moment to check in it's DU, it's probably under the Images menu).

Restoring often requires you to 'scan for restore' too, which checksums the content IIRC.

I think I tried this eons ago but it wasn't for me so I stuck with dd & the other commands.

https://sevenbits.github.io/Mac-Linux-USB-Loader/

Unetbootin is another option, I think that creates it's own boot environment & chainloads like USB loader.

https://unetbootin.github.io/