This means the device name of my USB drive is /dev/sdb. I know that my USB drive is around 16 GB in size, so the second one must be my USB drive. Next, open the terminal and run this command to list all disk drives known to your Linux system:Īs you can see in the previous screenshot, my Linux system knows about two disks.
Make sure you plugged the USB drive into your PC at this point. So as a first step, we need to identify the device name.
When using the dd program to write the ISO file to the USB drive, it is extremely important that you select the correct device name. The powerful dd utility program makes this possible. In contrast to the previous section, in this section we’ll use just the terminal to create a bootable USB drive from a Linux ISO image. Write the ISO file to the USB drive with dd This probably meant that the USB drive was still mounted. In case you get an error dialog stating that the process ended unexpectedly, simply try again. Here is a screen animation that demonstrates these steps: Once completed, you can simply close the Balena Etcher application.To start writing the ISO file to the USB drive, click the Flash! button.Click the Select target button and pick your USB drive from the list of available drives.Select Flash from file and select your Linux ISO image in the file open dialog.To create a bootable USB drive from a Linux ISO image, perform these steps: You can find its launcher in your desktop environment’s application menu. In case Balena Etcher doesn’t start, have a look at this fix.
The article about installing a minimal Raspberry PI operating system explains how to use Balena Etcher for that purpose. Especially handy for those that work with Raspberry PIs. Note that you can even use it to write operating system images to an SD-card.
It’s a free and open source application that makes writing ISO images to a USB drive a breeze.
The first method, where we’ll just use graphical user interface programs, builds on Balena Etcher. I downloaded the Ubuntu Budgie ISO image myself for this article: Write the ISO file to the USB drive with Balena Etcher If not and you are looking for one to test with, you could give Ubuntu Budgie a try. You probably already downloaded an ISO image. Since our goal is to create a bootable USB drive from a Linux ISO image, we’ll need an ISO image. Therefore a USB drive of 8 GB or more works perfectly. Since Linux ISO images are originally meant for optical disks, an ISO image will typically not be larger than 4.7 GB. Besides that, you just need a USB drive such as a memory stick of a few Gigabytes.
It could be on a regular PC or laptop, a Raspberry PI or simply a virtual machine.
This article assumes you already have Linux running somewhere. To cover all bases, I’ll present two different methods: One where we just use graphical user interface programs and one where we do everything directly in the terminal. In this article, I’ll explain how you can create a bootable USB drive from a Linux ISO image. This leads to the question: “How do I write the Linux ISO image to my USB drive, such that my PC can boot from it”? That is exactly the topic of this article.
This makes option two the more viable and preferable one. Chances are that you have a USB drive of a few GB lying around somewhere already. The BIOS of all modern PCs offer support to boot from a USB drive. Create a bootable USB drive from the Linux ISO.What to do? Well, you can chose between the following two options: Nowadays desktop PCs, and specifically laptops, no longer feature a CD or DVD drive to boot from. As the name implies, you write this ISO image file to a CD or DVD and then boot your PC from this CD or DVD. This file is an ISO image, which is short for optical disc image. For example the Debian network installer or Clonezilla live release. When you want to install Linux or boot a Linux live environment, you start by downloading the installer or live environment from the Internet. But how do you create a bootable USB drive from the downloaded Linux ISO image? Grab your USB drive, a beverage of choice and read on, as that is exactly the question I’ll answer in this article. No problem, because you found out that your PC can also boot directly from a USB drive. You realize your PC did not come with a CD or DVD drive anymore. You eagerly downloaded the ISO image of your Linux distribution of choice.