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Mac Linux USB Loader is a tool for the Mac that lets you create bootable thumb drives containing your favorite installation of Linux - but unlike other major tools like unetbootin, the drives it creates can be booted on a Mac. Built upon core Mac technologies and powered by Enterprise, Mac Linux USB Loader is free, open-sourced, and supports most of the major Linux distributions in use today - including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Kali Linux, and more!

If you have tried to create a bootable USB key from an iso image in Mac OSX using Disk Utility then you have probably encountered the frustrating and almost Windows-like cryptic error message "Could not validate source - Invalid argument" error. Looking in the system log via the Console app I suspect this is because internally DiskUtil tries to run /usr/sbin/asr to verify the image, which fails.   1 2 3 $ asr imagescan --source ubuntu-rescue-remix-12-04.iso only UDIF and NDIF images can be scanned. asr: image scan failed - Invalid argument. UDIF and NDIF are image formats used by Apple, and Disk Utility is pretty hopeless with anything that falls outside of these standards. The iso standard is short for ISO9660 and is a standard that defines the format of an image intended for burning to CD. Even after using hdutil to convert the image to UDRO (a UDIF Read-Only image) Disk Utility will still stubbornly refuse to help. Disk Destroyer Duplicator to the rescue Being Unix based, OSX has the command line dd utility available. Short for Disk Duplicator, dd is a block level reader/writer that makes raw copies from one file to another. But you want to copy the image to a device, right? That's fine, because everything in the world of Unix/Linux is a file - even devices. Informally referred to as Disk Destroyer, should you tell dd to output to the wrong device then your day is definitely going to be spoiled, so to avoid any mishaps we will make sure we know which devices on your system is your USB stick. You can determine this from the command line: