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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know what could be wrong with your USB stick but there are many reasons booting can fail when imaging install disks like this…

• The source may be incorrectly copied to an iso/ disk image.
  • Cloning DVD/CD media to USB is not guaranteed to work. Some boot systems have additional partitions that may or may not need to be included on media that has particular structure specific to those media types.
  • Occasionally you may find an elaborate workaround to 'chainload' from a linux or other bootable media, that may get around an incorrectly setup disk (grub, unetbootin, rEFIt or rEFIned on EFI systems).
• Cloning images back to a disk requires specific tools depending on the OS & boot method it employs, sometimes a dd is enough but only if that image was originally intended to boot from USB and the structure is compatible.
• Booting can fail due to BIOS/ UEFI settings or incompatibilities.
• Some USB sticks are just plain weird - they do not all support booting for whatever reason because they violate the USB spec or just behave strangely.

I do not know what copy protection Windows disks use - I thought most of it was embedded into the OS & MS get their money via the activation fees. I have previously downloaded MS test virtual machines which can be activated if you have a suitable key. Have a look for a trial download of the version you are trying to install. Otherwise there may be a way to request a suitable installer from Microsoft or your original PC manufacturer (assuming you registered it).

Personally I'd try to use Disk Utility to image from the DVD straight to the USB stick to rule out the chance of issues with the iso. If that fails, try the same with Etcher or another tool that clones disks, be sure to select an appropriate partition scheme - I think older Windows would prefer MBR whilst newer new can use GPT/GUID partition tables.

Another option is a disk repair tool to try to recover/ clone/ fix the original disk.

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.

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/

Bebias wrote:

BTW as I have been searching more on that, it seems a lot of reputable sites actually call it "burning" an ISO to a USB drive. So if people were confused by my title, it seems they'll be confused by a lot of the web! 😉

It's just me it confused, so keep dragging this point up, I enjoy being ridiculed when trying to offer help!

Bebias wrote:

Update: I am giving it a bit more time, but it looks like I will be leaving OSX behind as my main computing platform.

If you care to share the instructions that require the commandline I may be able to point towards you to how to do that in the GUI as mentioned you can convert & restore disk images in Disk Utility.

What OS you thinking about using instead?

Restore volumes on 10.11 does not seem to work, always giving "Restore process has failed."

I am trying to copy a Windows disc to a USB stick. The instructions do mention to erase the volume to restore first, which leads to a choice of format and scheme, with 18 possible permutations. I tried all those that seemed likely, with no success.

If anyone from Apple is listening, I agree with Bebias that right clicking a disc image in the finder should give the option of not only burning a disc, but also of writing to a USB stick. The two actions are similar from a user perspective.

dfxgordon wrote:

If anyone from Apple is listening, I agree with Bebias that right clicking a disc image in the finder should give the option of not only burning a disc, but also of writing to a USB stick. The two actions are similar from a user perspective.

Don't count on anyone from Apple listening here, tell them directly if you want any chance of it being added as a feature…

http://feedback.apple.com/

Have you tried Etcher?

https://www.etcher.io

I don't know what the Windows disk is so it may not work, let us know what happens.