How to make a bootable Linux flash drive in Sierra?

[steffi]

Unetbootin and dd from the command line is not resulting in a flash drive that will boot from the computer for the Ubuntu distributions I'm imaging.

It has worked for another distribution such as Gparted Live but the Ubuntu 11.04 I'm trying to build just doesn't boot from a relative old Dell Laptop.

 

[treekram]

I haven't used Unetbootin but it has a version for macOS so I presume it works. dd should be no issue. So I would say to make sure you have the flash drive formatted in FAT32. If that isn't the issue, I would blame the "old Dell Laptop" (make sure your BIOS settings for your Linux distro are correct and the BIOS is set to boot from the USB and you should be using a USB2 flash drive if there's any doubt). Interestingly, there was an old Dell laptop running Redhat in my workplace some years ago and after a power outage (battery was long dead), it couldn't boot. I wasn't able to re-install Linux on that computer after that (we routinely did Linux installs so I hope we were competent enough to do that). I was able to install Windows XP on that computer so who knows that the issue was?