Creating an Ubuntu 9.04 USB boot drive using a Mac?

I have the .iso image burned to disc already.

I've already tried restarting the Mac with the disc and USB drives in place and holding down the "c" key (boot from disc drive) and it isn't working. I sort of figured it'd be the same as creating a Linpus recovery USB drive using the AA1's recovery DVD.

 

Diskutil

1. Download the desired .img file
2. Open a Terminal (under Utilities)
3. Run diskutil list to get the current list of devices
4. Insert your flash media
5. Run diskutil list again and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g. /dev/disk2)
6. Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
7. Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/diskN bs=1m
8. Run diskutil eject /dev/diskN and remove your flash media when the command completes



(source: http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/04/4-ways-to-create-bootable-live-usb.html )

 

One has to replace 7. above with

7. Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/diskN bs=1048567

since the option "bs=1m" is not suppported in Mac OS X right now.

 

I've tried doing this both ways:

bs=1m

and...

bs=1048567

No luck.

What I've ended up with twice is a USB flash drive that has the files on it, but the drive is not "bootable". All OS X has done is transfer the files. The USB drive's name is unchanged and when I attempt to install this distro (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) on the AA1 all I get is a black screen with "boot error".

So where to now?

Also, I'm curious to know why Ubuntu 9.04 dowloads as an ".iso" file but 9.04 netbook remix is an .img file

 

The .iso files are images of the data on an ISO9660 compliant CD/DVD-rom. The .img files are an image of the data directly from a filesystem such as fat32, ext2 or whatever filesystem the developer have chosen to use. In the case of the UNR image, it is a fat32 filesystem a far as I recall.
So the reason for the UNR being distributed as an img file is because most, if not all, of the devices that the UNR targets, do not come with a CD/DVD rom, but all of them are able to boot from an USB key. So instead of people having to lend/buy/steal an USB CD/DVD player, Canonical ltd tries to make it easier for them, by providing an image file that can be written to an USB key.

Try to dd the img file again, and make sure that you remembered to unmount the USB key. Also note that in step 7 this applies :

( https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Insta ... omImgFiles )