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I'm trying to install Arch on a flash drive. To do so, I'm trying to first get a bootable, "live" version of Arch on the flash drive I'm going to install it on later.

I've followed the instructions here to the letter, but for some reason, the Mac's bootloader doesn't recognize the flash drive at all, and it's not showing up on my desktop as an external storage device.

It does, however, show up in Disk Utility, and when I run diskutil list in the terminal. Attempts to mountDisk are failing repeatedly, both from the terminal and GUI disk utilities.

To clarify: I'm able to mount the disk (as in, /dev/disk2, but not the logical volume, i.e. disk2s2, which contains Archboot).

This, in turn, prevents the bootloader from detecting the flash drive as a bootable volume.

I have already asked this question on Ask Different, but it doesn't seem likely that I'll get much help with it there.

Has anyone else here had this issue? How did you fix it?

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"I've followed the instructions here to the letter", where, which instructions? –  nerdwaller Sep 17 '13 at 21:38
@nerdwaller Sorry, forgot to put in the link. Fixed. –  at least three characters Sep 17 '13 at 21:54

1 Answer 1

You say the bootloader didn't recognize the flash drive, so I'm going to assume you shut off the laptop and turned it on while pressing the "option" key, right?

The flash drive not mounting is pretty normal, its happened to all of the bootable usbs I've made with the dd command. It does not have to be mountable in order for it to work.

You might want to try using use unetbootin to create a bootable drive. The website says it supports Arch Linux 2010.05, but you can just use any disk image.

Lastly, if you get the usb to work, I hope you know that you will need an alternate boot menu to boot into arch, such as rEFIt.

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Holding down the option key is exactly what I did. I know that I'll eventually need to install rEFIt as well, but I didn't know about unetbootin. I'll give it a shot! –  at least three characters Sep 17 '13 at 23:16

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