Copying ESX4i onto a USB Memory Stick using a Mac

Format the memory stick as FAT using Disk Utility, label it ESX4i for later identification purposes. This also ensures that the memory stick is working properly, which given the crap ones I've had from trade shows it no bad thing.

Expanding The Downloaded File

To start with, we need to mount the downloaded ISO file. On a Mac, you don't need any additional software. We can simply double click the .iso file to mount it:

Next, we need to expand the image.tgz archive. The problem is that the .iso image that you've mounted is read only. So I copied the image.tgz to my Desktop folder. Then double click it to expand.

Inside the expanded directory structure is a bzipped file that contains the install image. Assuming that you expanded image.tgz on your desktop, you find it in Desktop/usr/lib/vmware/installer. It's called something similar to VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd.bz2 (the build numbers will change was time progresses of course.)

This bzipped file needs to be expanded too.

After a few minutes, you'll have a file with a .dd extension. This is the raw disk image that we'll write to the memory stick:

Copying the Image to the Memory Stick

At a command prompt, type 'mount' (or use Disk Utility) to find the device ID for the memory stick. As I named my volume 'ESX4i' when I formatted it, I can easily see which one is my device in the following list:


Tom-Rowans-MacBookPro:~ tomrowan$ mount
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
fdesc on /dev (fdesc, union)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, automounted)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted)
/dev/disk2s1 on /Volumes/ESX4I (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)
/dev/disk3 on /Volumes/CDROM (cd9660, local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, noowners, quarantine, mounted by tomrowan)


The device ID is /dev/disk2 NOT /dev/disk2s1. The s1 refers to slice one, which is the first partition. We'll be removing this partition shortly.

Umount the USB key in finder by dragging it to Trash. The underlying UNIX system will still be able to see the USB device. If you don't believe me, use the Disk Utility to check that the USB device is still visible as a potentially mountable device. Caution: make sure that you choose the right target. I would unplug all other USB or firewire disks to be 100% sure that they cannot be accidentally overwritten with the ESX4i image.


Tom-Rowans-MacBookPro:Desktop tomrowan$ cd /Users/tomrowan/Desktop/usr/lib/vmware/installer/
Tom-Rowans-MacBookPro:installer tomrowan$ ls
VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd.bz2
Tom-Rowans-MacBookPro:installer tomrowan$ dd if=VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd of=/dev/disk2
1843200+0 records in
1843200+0 records out
943718400 bytes transferred in 846.493160 secs (1114856 bytes/sec)


This will take some time. How long depends very much on the USB drive you are using. Mine was a free (read 'slow') one that I picked up at a trade show, so it took nearly fifteen minutes. It'll be fine for the purpose, but I wouldn't trust it for production. You'll now be able to boot from the USB stick in a suitable server.