Hello this is my first time using etcher so please bear with me here but im trying to make a bootable snow leopard mac os on a usb drive on my windows computer and this is the error I got from etcher, the ISO im using is a snow leopard iso i found online but im not sure what a partition table is the while the mac did boot from this usb, halfway through installing with this usb drive it runs into an error so im not sure what the fix here would be, any help is appreciated. Thanks!
ERROR CODE:
“It looks like this is not a bootable image. The image does not appear to contain a a partition table, and might not be recognized or bootable by your device.”
Hello,
This is not an error, just a warning. Etcher looks for a GPT or MBR partition table in disk images and warns you if it can’t find one.
Depending on the device that you’ll be using the flashed disk with, it might still boot. And it looks like it booted in your case so this is not an issue.
I know this is not on topic, but I was wondering if you had a list of steps from a wiped hdd to a working mac. I actually am also trying to do snow leopard. I have yet to find an iso, but I have a dmg.
I just wanted to write Windows installer ISO-s on Mac but the same issue happened. Then I managed to make it on a Windows using Rufus. Now, Rufus DID make a bootable drive from the SAME ISO which balenaEtcher failed to make from.
Guys, we love this app, it’s seamless – until we don’t want to make bootable Windows drives. Yet, it means that balenaEtcher does not know something it should know and what’s possible: to make a bootable Windows installer from an ISO file.
Etcher currently doesn’t support creating Windows bootable disks, mostly due to complexity around NFTS and FAT limitations.
In the meantime, to create one on macOS:
brew install wimlib
image_file=Win10_20H2_v2_English_x64.iso
hdiutil mount ${image_file}
# assuming USB is on /dev/disk2
usb_disk=$(diskutil list | grep external | head -n 1 | awk '{print $1}')
diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS "WINDOWS10" MBR ${usb_disk}
rsync -avh --progress --exclude=sources/install.wim /Volumes/DVD_ROM/ /Volumes/WINDOWS10
wimlib-imagex split /Volumes/DVD_ROM/sources/install.wim /Volumes/WINDOWS10/sources/install.swm 3800
hdiutil eject /Volumes/WINDOWS10
hdiutil eject /Volumes/DVD_ROM
This requires the target Windows device to have UEFI boot options enabled (not legacy boot).
Etcher will however write /Applications/Install\ macOS\ {Catalina,BigSur,etc.}.app/Contents/SharedSupport/BaseSystem.dmg to a USB drive, which will be bootable without any further steps.