In this article, I will walk you through the process of creating a bootable USB flash drive (LiveUSB) on Linux, Windows, and MacOS operating systems. I will write to a flash drive ISO image Linux distribution, but you can use the programs described below to burn any Live images.
As a rule, the user is faced with the task of writing an ISO image to a USB flash drive in order to get a LiveUSB as a result. For example, you decide to install Ubuntu. To do this, you download an ISO image with the system, burn it to a USB flash drive, boot from the USB flash drive, and the Live system or installer starts.
To boot from a LiveUSB flash drive, you must set your computer's BIOS to boot from USB in the first place. For many motherboards when you turn on the computer, you can call up a menu in which you can choose which device to boot from. In that case, change BIOS settings not required. For example, I have this menu called by pressing the key F12.
For creating bootable flash drive I will use free program Etcher. This is a very simple and understandable program. Creating bootable media is done in it is extremely simple.
The program is cross-platform and with its help you can create bootable USB flash drives in Linux, Windows and MacOS. It works the same on all systems.
The program can be downloaded from the official website https://etcher.io
Note: IN Linux installation not required, just download the file etcher-1.2.3-x86-64.AppImage and run it.
Consider the process of creating a bootable USB flash drive in the Etcher program.
There is a fairly popular program for Linux UNetbootin, which allows you to create bootable flash drives. It can burn disk images, as well as automatically download images of popular Linux distributions (although very old versions of distributions are available for download, so this feature is unlikely to be useful to you).
The program is cross-platform and can be used on both Windows and MacOS. I have only tested it under Linux. But she has one big drawback! Some flash drives created by her simply refuse to boot. For example, nothing worked for me until I formatted the flash drive in FAT16. I formatted the flash drive in the GParted program, the size of the partition on the flash drive was automatically set to 4GB, the rest of the free space was simply not used.
The following describes the process of creating a bootable USB flash drive in UNetbootin.
If you receive the message " Missing Operating System”, then most likely the flash drive does not have the flag Boot. To install it, restart your computer and log in to your system. After that, run the command in the terminal (the flash drive must be connected):
Parted /dev/sdb set 1 boot on
Now restart your computer again.
I encountered another error while booting the computer - "No default or UI configuration directive found". It was possible to solve this problem only by formatting the flash drive in FAT16 and re-creating LiveUSB.
Optical discs are a thing of the past. As well as floppy disks and other similar drives. Now flash drives rule and external drives. They are convenient to use for installing systems, so today we will look at how you can use a USB flash drive to install the Ubuntu distribution from it. We will also look at the method of creating such a flash drive in the Windows 10 operating system (although this also works for earlier operating systems).
The program itself can be downloaded from the link. latest version Ubuntu distribution - .
It remains to wait for the end of the rewriting and restart the computer.
This is already a more serious, multifunctional and paid program. We take. She can do a lot, but now we are interested in writing the image to a USB flash drive.
Of course, these are not all utilities. There are many more interesting ones, but for starters, we believe this is enough. Don't get too far, we'll show you how to install Ubuntu step by step.
Instruction
First of all, you need to prepare a USB flash drive to install the installation image on it. Linux distribution. For this you need to download USB program Disk Storage Format Tool. You can easily find it on the Internet. With this utility, you need to format the USB flash drive in file system FAT (note not FAT32, but FAT) for better compatibility. The same can be done in Linux using the built-in tools. On Ubuntu, this is disks or gparted (need to be installed separately).
Download and install Unetbootin. On Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and its derivatives this utility is already in the repositories, so just install it through your package manager (App Center, Synaptic, etc.). For Windows program can be downloaded from the official website http://unetbootin.github.io/
Insert flash drive into usb port. Launch the Unetbootin program from the menu. Please note that the program will require administrative privileges. If you have not yet downloaded the Linux distribution, then you can do this directly in the Unetbootin program. At the top of the window, select a distribution and then a version. Then, at the bottom of the window, select the USB drive and specify which media you need to install on. I recommend turning off all unnecessary flash drives during the installation procedure so as not to destroy important data. Press the "OK" button, after which the image will be downloaded and then installed on the flash drive. The procedure may take a long time if you have a slow internet connection.
If the distribution kit you need is not in the Unetbootin menu or you have already downloaded the image yourself, then select the "Disk Image" option at the bottom of the window. Then, by clicking on the button with three dots, find the distribution image. Specify the USB flash drive as in the previous step and click the "OK" button. The unpacking of the image to the USB flash drive will begin immediately. Thus, you can install almost any image on a USB flash drive. For example Live CD Drweb or Hirens Boot CD.
Probably most of you could think about the problem of preparing a boot flash drives with operating system Linux on board and subsequently install Ubuntu systems from a flash drive. In this article, we will be able to see in detail how to implement this in an already installed Linux. Read about how to create a bootable USB flash drive in Windows here:. Well, let's go 🙂
All we may need is an empty flash drive with at least 2 gigabytes of information to be entered, image ISO some kind of disk with a Linux system, an Internet connection and some free time.
Well, of course, the first thing we do in this case is (in no case do we insert a flash drive) we install a special software, namely a software application with a somewhat unusual name UNetBootin. This is a great software application designed to create bootable flash drives from ISO images. There is nothing superfluous in it, it is easy to manage and it is also available in the repository repository ubuntu.
Let's install it now:
sudoapt-getinstall unet-bootin
And after waiting for a few minutes, you can already run this program:
In that software application there is also the possibility create bootable flash drives, even if you do not have an ISO image with the Linux operating system at hand. It will simply rewrite itself from the Internet and then be rewritten to a flash drive. In order to do this in the above software application, it will be necessary to select the top checkbox “distribution”, then select the required Linux distribution and select the version of this distribution. True, we already have our own ISO image. For this reason, we select the second checkbox “image”, select our image format - ISO from the list of formats (in case it suddenly does not appear by default), then press the “…” button and look for it on the hard drive our personal computer.
It is also possible to create an image manually (while specifying your initrd , kernel and using additional options), but all this goes very far beyond the scope of our today's article, and we don’t need it.
Everything, the image is already selected for us, then we must make our choice on the “Type” item - USB drive to indicate our flash drive, on which we will write our image “Drive: /nodiv/sdb2” and click on the Ok button. Everything, the process has begun! In the event that you made your choice on the top checkbox, then the process of burning the image may take much longer, since the image must first be downloaded to HDD, and then it will be recorded. This concludes our article. Good luck.
Operating room users Windows systems can very easily create a bootable USB stick with an Ubuntu image on it. To do this, you can use special software.
To burn Ubuntu, you need to have an ISO image of the operating system that will be stored on removable media, as well as the drive itself. It is important to understand that all data will be erased on the USB drive used.
Before creating a bootable USB flash drive, download the distribution of the operating system itself. We recommend doing this exclusively on the official Ubuntu website. This approach has many advantages. The main one is that the downloaded operating system will not be damaged or unfinished. The fact is that when downloading the OS from third-party sources, it is likely that you will download an image of a system converted by someone.
If you have a flash drive with which you can erase all data, and a downloaded image, use one of the methods listed below.
This program is considered the most basic in matters of writing Ubuntu to removable media. It is used most often. You can read how to use it in the tutorial on creating a boot drive (method 5).
Point 3 in LinuxLive USB Creator we skip and do not touch.
As you can see, the program has a rather interesting and non-standard interface. This, of course, is attractive. A very good move was to add a traffic light near each block. A green light on it means that you did everything right and vice versa.
There is another very unpopular, "unpromoted" program that does a great job of burning an Ubuntu image to a USB flash drive. Its huge advantage is that Xboot is able to add on bootable media not only myself operating system as well as additional programs. These can be antiviruses, all kinds of launch utilities, and the like. Initially, the user does not need to download the ISO file and this is also a big plus.
To use Xboot, follow these steps:
So, create a bootable USB flash drive with an Ubuntu image Windows users very easy. This can be done in just a few minutes and even a novice user can cope with such a task.
