I have a little Gigabyte BRIX that I'm trying to install Linux on. However, my Mac appears to be barfing on every ISO image I've downloaded. So far, I've tried Mint and Ubuntu (and even FreeBSD out of curiosity), and I've verified their checksums (so not corrupt), but so far, MacOS is balking at every one of them with "no mountable file systems."

So far, my attempts to drop one of these onto a thumbdrive so that I can actually install it on the BRIX has been a failure. And yes, I've tried Etcher, but so far have totally bricked two USB drives; Disk Utility's First Aid just immediately gave up (something about a partition problem).

Is this something new with Mojave? I never had this much trouble before with ISO images.

I've tried the various hdiutil attach -noverify -nomount tricks, but I still can't seem to do anything with an ISO image. And yeah, I've used hdiutil convert to mutate it into a DMG, but I still get "no mountable file systems."

Anyone? I've been banging my head against this for a week now.

3

1 Answer

Was trying to mount a Ubuntu Server ISO image on MacOS Mojave and ran into this.

Found an answer that works on the Unix Stack Exchange:

Step 1. Attaching as a block device

# the '-nomount' option avoids the 'mount failed' error
$ hdiutil attach -nomount debian-8.5.0-amd64-CD-1.iso
/dev/disk2 Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/disk2s1 Apple_partition_map
/dev/disk2s2 Apple_HFS
# verify disk is a block device (indicated by 'b' at line start)
$ ls -l /dev/disk2
br--r----- 1 amorphid staff 1, 5 Jul 27 19:41 /dev/disk2

Step 2. Mount the disk with cd9660 (aka ISO9660) file system

# create mount point
$ mkdir -p /tmp/debian-installer
# mount the disk
$ mount -t cd9660 /dev/disk2 /tmp/debian-installer
# see da filez!
$ ls -l /tmp/debian-installer
total 2296
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 9468 Jun 4 09:24 README.html
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 185525 Jun 1 00:52 README.mirrors.html
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 100349 Jun 1 00:52 README.mirrors.txt
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 461 Jun 4 08:37 README.source
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 6000 Jun 4 09:24 README.txt
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 146 Jun 4 08:37 autorun.inf
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 2048 Jun 4 08:37 boot
...

Step 3. Unmount the disk

# this will fail if the disk is being used
$ umount /dev/disk2

Step 4. Detach the disk

$ hdiutil detach /dev/disk2
"disk2" unmounted.
"disk2" ejected.

2

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