Month: October 2017

Posted on

Write an iso to an external drive from Mac os X

 

A quick cheat!

Running an ios based installer from a hard drive, instead of from a usb can often be faster and is useful if you have a swag of machines to re image and esata is a lot faster than say usb V2. I’ve needed to do this a few times but I often spend far to much time looking for the information. So, Now I’ve written this little cheat!

First run this

diskutil list

This will give you a list of drives and the result will look a little like this

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                                                   *80.0 GB    disk2

As you can see hear the disk attached I want to write to is /dev/disk2
The command to use is

sudo dd if=linuxmint-18.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m

This will write the contents of the iso the the external drive

Break down of the command

dd if={path_to_iso_image} of/dev/{location of device you want this written to} bs=1m

Enjoy

Posted on

Detail and old technology

I keep lots of note books, technical one’s and personal. Unfortunately like most people I’m not blessed with a photographic memory, but I can get rather methodical, and that’s useful.

Technical writing – this blogging thing is valuable. But I also like to write things in long hand and in pencil in note books! I know it sounds crazy, because these days we can google many if not most problems. But writing my own cheat sheets, (spells, as I call them ) can help a lot to jog the memory. Often it can be just as quick if not quicker than trying to find that page in google you forgot to book mark 3 years ago!

Not to mention that there is some evidence that a hand written approach to the problem solving process can have a number of positive side effects.

When I’m working on something technical my journal is close buy but I’ll also have the index open that I maintain in a spread sheet. The reason is that it’s a lot quicker to find things via the spread sheet. But I also have a hand written index that is good for if i’m off line or taking things slowly. We live in very fast times but it’s good on occasion to slow down a little, think and reap the benefits.