Create a bootable USB Hiren’s Boot CD on MacOS

This article was originally published on Medium on May 8, 2023.

I’ve fallen victim to helping my sister with her personal computer. She hadn’t used it in a while and had forgotten her password. After some research, I learned that one of the best ways to reset it is by using Hiren’s Boot CD.

I initially tried using Etcher but it doesn’t create a Master Boot Record (MBR) for you. As of macOS Catalina, the graphical user interface for the native macOS Disk Utility application no longer provides an option to create an MBR. After trying countless tools, I finally found a native process that works.

PREPARATION

All preparation steps should be completed before proceeding to the creation of the bootable USB drive.

Download and Verify ISO

In order to save potential headache, it’s good practice to always verify your downloads. If the checksum do not match, that means your download may be corrupt. You will then need to download the ISO again.

Download ISO

1. Open Hiren’s Boot CD download page.
2. Scroll to the bottom until you see a table
3. Click on the HBCD_PE_x64.iso link.
4. Keep this page open for checksum verification in the next sub-step

Checksum Verification of ISO

Note: The following steps require the ISO download to be completed.

1. Open the Terminal
2. Execute: sha256sum /Path/To/Your/HBCD_PE_x64.iso
3. Verify that at least the last 6 characters of the output match the checksum for SHA-256 checksum provided on Hiren’s download page

Obtaining the Disk Identifier for Your USB Drive

Note: This section may be easier if you remove all other USB Drives attached besides the one will be using to install Hiren’s boot CD.

1. Open the Terminal
2. Insert your USB Drive
3. Execute: diskutil list external
4. Locate the IDENTIFIER header. This is the id column where we will look for the disk id.

Note: the disk id for your USB Drive. You may see diskXsY. Where X and Y are numbers. We just need to the diskX part. If you are not sure if it’s the correct disk, you can execute diskutil info diskX to see more details that may help identify the disk.

Create The MBR Partition

Using the disk id we found above, we will now erase the entire disk and create a new MBR partition. This command will also name the drive MY_HBCD, which we will reference in future steps.

diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS MY_HBCD MBR diskX

Open Hiren’s Boot CD ISO to macOS

Next we will mount the newly downloaded and verify the mount as we need it in the next step.

1. Execute: diskutil image attach /Path/To/Your/HBCD_PE_x64.iso
2. Execute: diskutil list external
3. Verify you see a new disk mounted besides the USB Drive from the previous step. You should see HBCD_PE_x64 under the column called NAME

Copy Files from ISO Mount to USB Drive Mount

Typically to copy files, we would use the cp command. However, due to the fact this copy process may take a while, we will use rsync. rsync accepts a flag to show progress of the copy.

rsync --recursive --progress /Volumes/HBCD_PE_x64/ /Volumes/MY_HBCD/

Important: Allow this task to finish before proceeding to the cleanup steps. The terminal prompt should have returned and you should see a cursor awaiting new input.

Cleaning Up

Given that all of the files were copied successfully. We need to perform the following cleanup steps.

1. Execute: diskutil eject HBCD_PE_x64
2. Execute: diskutil eject MY_HBCD

Verify you see message stating the targeted disk was ejected. If it was not successfully ejected, ensure you’re current working directory in the terminal is not either of the mounts.

Wrapping Up

If the shell, ISO, USB Drive, and macOS operating system gods have aligned, you should have yourself a Hiren’s Boot CD bootable USB Drive. Now go off and save the day you little Windows administrator. I wish you luck and happy hacking!