[OSGeoLive] Booting from Osgeo-live flashdrive on a Mac

[Jim Klassen]

Are they Intel Macs?  M1 (ARM) Macs won’t boot a x86 operating system.

When I have made OSGeo Live bootable USB drives, I've worked from the ISO download image.  That image includes a combined BIOS MBR boot/CDROM El Torito boot (isolinux) and an EFI boot (grub).  The Mac sees the EFI boot.

My 2009 Mac finds it when holding down the Option key on startup.

I'm not sure how two NTFS partitions play into that, but I think at least the EFI partition needs to be FAT32 (HFS+ is also allowed as a special case for the EFI partition on a Mac, but it is not necessary).  I suspect a NTFS partition could be added after the existing partitions on the image if one was careful.  The partition table on the image is a bit weird with the ISO9660 "partition" overlapping the partition table and the EFI partition, so I'm not sure if normal tools can edit it without messing something up.

On Mon, Feb 14, 2022 at 23:20 Jochen Albrecht <jochen.albrecht at gmail.com> wrote:

    As part of my Advanced GIS course, I provided every student with a 32 GB OSGeo-live flashdrive, formatted with NTFS on two partitions. They both fine on a variety of Windows computers (as well as my Pop OS Linux laptop) but they are not recognized on my students' Macs.
    I don't have a Mac and no experience with them. Following online docs, they try both the Options and the Command key but to no avail.
    I now have the sneaking suspicion that I will have to format the two partitions to HFS+ and then somehow put the OSGeo archive on it.
    Is this correct and if yes, how do I do this without a Mac (I can do the former with gparted but how to do the latter on  Windowsor Linux machine)? Are there alternative approaches to create OSGeo-live flashdrives that my Mac-based students can use?
    Cheers,
          Jochen
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