24 Janvier 2021
One great thing about Linux is that you can try it out without installing it on your hard drive. Most Linux distributions provide disk images (ISO files) that contain everything you need to boot into a live environment and, optionally, begin installation.
Use your Linux ISO image file to create a bootable USB installation media. You can use any software like Unetbootin, Gnome Disk Utility, Yumi Multi Boot, xboot, Live USB Creator, etc. To create bootable USB with the help of ISO image file. Alternatively, you can use DVD disk by writing that ISO image to it (but that is the old school method).
But how do you transfer a downloaded disk image to a USB flash drive? In this article, we provide three solutions to help you create a bootable Linux USB flash drive on Linux, Windows, macOS, and even Android.
Written in Electron, Etcher is a cross-platform open source utility for flashing disk images to USB drives and memory cards. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux and provides an approachable graphical user interface that reduces the process of creating a bootable Linux USB to just three simple steps.
Unlike other similar software tools, Etcher prevents users from accidentally wiping their entire hard drives, which is something you'll definitely appreciate if you've never created a bootable USB before and understandably feel anxious about the process.
To create a bootable Linux USB with Etcher:
1. Download Etcher from its official website.
2. Launch Etcher.
3. Select the ISO file you want to flash to your USB drive.
4. Specify the target USB drive if the correct drive is not selected already.
5. Click the Flash! button and wait for the process to finish.
dd is a command-line utility for Unix-like operating systems whose primary purpose is to read/write data from/to device files, such as USB flash drives. Because dd is bundled in GNU coreutils, you can find it on virtually all Linux distributions, as well as on macOS.
To create a bootable Linux USB with dd:
The version of dd included in GNU coreutils doesn't provide any progress indication. If you'd like some reassurance that the transfer is progressing as it should, you can use the following command (replace dd-pid with the process-id of dd, which you can find using htop):
There's actually a version of dd for Windows that provides all the functionality you need to transfer an ISO file to a USB flash drive. To install it:
Unfortunately, dd for Windows was last updated in 2010, and many users have reported issues when using the utility in Windows 10. Considering that dd for Windows doesn't even support data conversion, such as byte order swapping and conversion to and from the ASCII and EBCDIC text encodings, you're probably better off using either Etcher or Rufus, which we describe in the next chapter.
Before the release of Etcher in 2016, Rufus was the best way to create a bootable Linux USB in Windows. This bootable USB flash drive creator is much faster than all of its Windows competitors, and it can create live USB drives for systems with both BIOS and UEFI. Rufus has been translated into several dozen languages, and it's compatible with Windows 7 and newer, both 32- and 64-bit.
To create a bootable Linux USB with Rufus:
In addition to creating live Linux USB flash drives, Rufus can also flash Windows disk images.
The last utility we want to describe is called EtchDroid, and its purpose is to write OS images to USB drives on Android smartphones and tablets.
Why would you want to use your Android device to create a bootable Linux USB? Well, imagine you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and your laptop stops working after a botched system update. Without another computer to use, your only option on how to create a bootable Linux USB to fix the issue is your Android device, and that's where EtchDroid comes in.
To create a bootable Linux USB with EtchDroid:
EtchDroid has been tested with Ubuntu and its derivatives, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Raspberry PI SD card images. It doesn't work with Windows, macOS, and old GNU/Linux distros. Support for Windows installation ISO files is on the developer's to-do list.
Do you know 'how to use USB memory sticks with Linux', If you are not sure then this article describes 'how to mount USB drive on a Linux system with command line interface'
Universal serial bus, or USB (also known as Flash drive), is an electronic communications protocol that is commonly used in computer accessories and other small devices. If you have an up-to-date Linux system and a modern Desktop environment, your device should show up on your desktop, with no need to open a console. There are few important factors which are involved in learning how to mount USB drive with Linux machine.
Following are the step by step instructions to understand further –
After you plug in your USB device to your Linux system USB port, It will add new block device into /dev/ directory. To verify it, use the following command –
The sample output should be like this –
We can observe from the above result that, device boot, blocks, id and system format are displayed.
To mount the USB, use the following command –
To create a directory in the mounted device, use the following commands –
The above command creates a directory called john in USB device.
To delete a directory in USB, use the following command –
You should unmount the device first to format the USB device, then use the following command to unmount the device –
Disable safari extensions. Now use either of the commands as per file system based on your requirement. To format a USB drive, users generally prefer VFAT or NTFS file systems because they can be easily mounted on Windows operating systems and Linux systems.
To format USB with vFat File System, use the following command –
To format a USB Flash Drive with NTFS file system, use the following command –
To format a USB with EXT4 file system, use the following command –
Congratulations! Now, you know 'How to Mount USB Drive in a Linux System?'. We'll learn more about these types of commands in our next Linux post. Keep reading!