Thumb drive formatting attempt results in error

[rib00]

MacBook Air 2017

I have a USB thumb drive that I plan to turn into a Mac OS Sierra bootable installer.

The MacBook Air had trouble formatting the drive. After taking too long, Disk Utility gave an error.

1) I am surprised that I even need to format the drive. Can't Mac OS just write the installer to the disc, whether it's formatted or not? I thought that a disk image just writes straight to the drive and doesn't care about anything except to warn you that you will overwrite whatever data is already there.

2) I have the disc inserted on a Linux Machine running GParted. All geared up to fix this mess. Questions:
a) what Partition table does Mac OS want? Choices that I have: aix, amiga, bsd, dvh, gpt, mac, msdos, pc98, sun, atari, or loop.
b) what size and what file system does Mac OS want on the drive? The .dmg file is about 5.6 GB.

 

[Harddrive]

On that Air to make a bootable drive it would have to be formatted to OS Extended Journaled and I would use at least a 32gb drive.

 

[rib00]

On that Air to make a bootable drive it would have to be formatted to OS Extended Journaled and I would use at least a 32gb drive.

I did try to format the drive to HFS+. I think HFS+ Journaled.
Even on the off chance that I chose something slightly different, it should have still formatted. Even after the error, the software and OS didn't really offer a solution to try to fix.
Why do you say 32 GB when the .dmg file is only about 5.6 GB?

 

[Harddrive]

That file is compressed they usually occupy 15gb when uncompressed in order to be a bootable drive which leaves little to no room on a 16gb hence I use 32gb drives for that.

 

[Bigwaff]

Even after the error, the software and OS didn't really offer a solution to try to fix.

Perhaps your thumb drive is simply incompatible or defective. What error did Disk Utility present?

 

[rib00]

Perhaps your thumb drive is simply incompatible or defective. What error did Disk Utility present?

I don't believe it gave much detail. Didn't say much more than it failed. I should have been more observant.

 

[Harddrive]

Also when you pull up info make sure it says you have read write permission.

 

[rib00]

Also when you pull up info make sure it says you have read write permission.

Ok. I can use ls -l command on a partition to see that. Should I check all of the subdirectories, too?

 

[Harddrive]

What did you have on this drive?

 

[rib00]

What did you have on this drive?

I used the sierra dmg installer to create an image file. I used a tool on Linux for this. The image file should be a decompressed version of the .dmg file. Then, I wrote that to this USB drive. This was not a sound approach. I was essentially a total newb just trying something. The mac seemed like it could read the drive. But, I didn't go browsing through its contents. I definitely could not boot to it, which was the plan. This all happened shortly before the OP.