How to create a bootable Linux USB drive
If you want to install Linux on a desktop, you'll first have to create a bootable USB drive with your distribution of choice.
Personally I use Ventoy
Basically I can just throw a whole bunch of ISOs on a USB drive and when I boot it it brings me to a menu to pick which one I want to boot
It's freaking great
I've got various windows ISOs and Linux distros just living on a 64GB flash drive
Yeah totally go with Ventoy. I had an external device that basically did the same thing but it was a pain in the ass. Little screen and you pick an iso on the drive and it simulated a CD rom. Ventoy is so much simpler. My only complaint is there isn’t an installer that works on a Mac so I have to use Windows. But other than that it’s awesome.
Ventoy is great. It was a bit confusing when I first ran into it. It installed, but I didn't know what happened. Lmao. I think I installed it like 10 times because it wasn't telling me what it did, but then the light bulb went off. Aaaaaah. I was trying to install windows on a laptop and it was being a bitch on the USB stick, and Ventoy made it work.
It must have gotten better than the last time I tried to use Ventoy. Maybe 5 years ago? It kept complaining that the USB drive I was using was bad when it worked completely fine with other tools.
It has gotten a lot better over the years
That was basically my first experience with it as well also about 5 years ago
Nowadays it works like a dream come true for every OS I've thrown on the drive
I tried a couple of months ago on my Windows PC and something went wrong somewhere and my USB was stuck in a permanent read-only state.
I definitely will give it another try though, it's super handy to have.
I'm an idiot and got Ventoy confused with another program I was testing at the time. Please ignore me.
Best way to have a bootable USB
Huh, never tried it. It has persistent storage? Updates? Security?
I'm currently using MX Linux for my Persistent, Live USB of choice, but apparently I need to check out Ventoy?
Any "How To" that doesn't just use Rufus isn't worth the page its text is rendered on. Rufus can do Linux boot disks, but is indispensable for Windows boot disk utilities. It's one of the only ways I know of to make a Windows ToGo installation (equivalent of a Linux Live USB), which I used to install Windows on a friends SD card for their Steam Deck so they can dual-boot.
If you're looking to make a Linux boot USB from Linux itself, BalenaEtcher is probably a better bet since Rufus is Windows-only.
https://github.com/balena-io/etcher
I've noticed there's tons of how-to's for making a bootable disk on Windows, hardly any for Linux. Perhaps we ought to remedy that?
For Linux you don't need a GUI tool, most how tos just dd the ISO onto the USB medium, e.g.
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sudo dd if=<file> of=<device> bs=16M status=progress oflag=sync
like described in the Debian FAQs
Man, Google really does suck now. It feels nearly impossible to get something like a how-to deep in the Debian FAQs to come up, as it mostly surfaces this auto-generated SEO crap for How To's.
Very cool, I'd assumed there was a simple command line set of commands, just was failing to find it. Thanks.
If you want to create fully custom boot images the command debootstick is pretty cool too!
It's essentially a wrapper for debootstrap that creates bootable images. It can create both live and installer images.
qemu-debootstrap is also super useful if you want to customize and image for a different architecture (for example building custom RPi images).
some distros have it built into it like Mint I was able to create a bookable drive of also mint
Neat, I wasn't aware of that for Mint.
I think I destroyed a USB stick back in the day doing this shit. be careful they don't lock the stick and if they do make sure you use the program to wipe the stick ASAP before you forget what program you used to make it.
I have a ventoy stick for this exact reason, just copy iso to stick, no need to burn a new one every time.
‘dd if=image.iso of=/dev/do_not_fuck_this_up bs=4M’ is a complete tutorial
cp *.iso /dev/disk
or
pv *.iso > /dev/disk
It's one of the only ways I know of to make a Windows ToGo installation (equivalent of a Linux Live USB),
You can also use WinToUSB for that btw. Yet another option is to install Windows to a VHD file (using a virtual machine, or using Disk2VHD to convert an existing install), then copy it to your USB, and make it bootable using Ventoy. The latter option is more useful, since with Ventoy you could have multiple other Linux ISOs (or other OS/rescue images) all on a single, portable drive.
Yet another option is to install Windows to a VHD file (using a virtual machine, or using Disk2VHD to convert an existing install), then copy it to your USB, and make it bootable using Ventoy
Neat, I saw Ventoy in here, but wasn't entirely sure about it until you mentioned this. Initially, I assumed it was what it said on the tin but just for Linux ISOs. Very cool you can finagle a Windows live install on there as well.
Gnome Disks Util. select mounted drive, go to top right and choose restore image
I tried Windows ToGo on a few USB keys (including two high-speed ones), never managed to get something I could actually use that was not laggy AF, to the point it's not usable (dozens of minutes to boot, lags of entire minutes and so on). Did I do something wrong?
the only piece of software i really miss on linux is rufus, by far.
Just curious does anyone know why it is an Irish address? I dont see many in the space but I know there is a really active linux contributor in Ireland and I am wondering if rufus is his.
Rufus is Pete Batard, found it through his links on Rufus's page.
Dunno who you're referring to specifically but you can cross reference now.
I doubt it; rufus is a windows only program
Uh yeah OK, I doubt anyone in c/linux didn't know how to do this already
I will say, as someone who has been looking for a simple way to install Linux on my Windows desktop at home, this is incredibly useful. Doubly so as I'm not very experienced with installing OS's and Linux can look very intimidating to an outsider looking in!
ZDNet content is 100% worthless these days.
Has been for a few years now.
I use Rufus. It just works.
And, more importantly, works on windows. I'd imagine windows users are the target audience for a "how to make a Linux USB" walkthrough.
I kept seeing so many different ones recommended and I kept getting weird issues I didn't understand with most of them. I don't often need to make a bootable Linux USB, but every time, Rufus did the job quick and easy.
Easy as shit to use to.
If you're already on linux there is no need to install special tools. Simply copy the iso directly to the USB device.
dd if=distribution.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1M && sync
You can do the same with cp too. Also safer.
But I use Ventoy nowadays.
oflag=sync also works instead of && sync. Might as well drop a status=progress in there too
cat works as well.
I would like to install a distro on a USB stick, without it doing something stupid to my internal drive's EFI.
I see people say this a lot and I have no experience with this but I wonder why you wouldn't use a USB nvme SSD enclosure it seems a lot easier and idk if running it over USB would limit the speed but it could preform better than a USB stick.
A dumb little stick is fine for the occasional "fix something up" or "take a snapshot of a Windows drive because dd is objectively better than anything that Windows itself could do". A live iso distro precludes me from adding a handful of other useful tools.
Late breaking edit : What I ended up doing was formatting a stick as small EFI / 5GB btrfs / rest exfat. Chattr +c the btrfs, and debootstrap in there. Put rEFInd on the efi and tell its conf file about the stick (or maybe it'll detect). Put non-free-firmware & stable-security into apt's sources.list. In a chroot shell, apt get live-task-non-free-firmware-pc gdm3 systemd-timesyncd linux-image-amd64 locales gnome-terminal. Add other tools to suit taste. Fix up the fstab, make /tmp tmpfs, make the exfat mount nofail. With btrfs compression, I can have a gnome environment inside of 2.5GB. It would be even more smol if I could figure out booting directly into Weston.
Unetbootin huh? Something tells me people capable of running a Linux-only application know how to make a Linux installer USB.
Unetbootin runs on Windows too..
also Mac
My bad, didn't know that
No shit I think flashing ISOs is now fine that we have Impression, Fedora Media writer und the KDE Usb flash tool.
But how the hell do you install Tails? May have to do that again, but last times it was never bootable.
Unetbootin in 2024? Jeez, just use Belena Etcher for single ISO, or dd if you are already on Linux (it should work on Mac as well) or Ventoy for simply folder of your bootable isos
I use Balena Etcher.
Popsicle for me, not a fan of electron.
Isn't that just 'sudo cp image.iso /dev/sdX && sync' ?
Not technically. unetbootin and some similar tools like rufus take the USB, partition it, and copy the contents of the disk to it after manually setting up a bootloader on it. This is not required for most Linux ISOs though where you can just cp or dd the image directly to the USB as they are already setup with all that on the image. But other ISOs, like I believe Windows ones have a filesystem on them that is not vfat so cannot be directly copied. Although these days for windows you just need to format the USB as vfat and copy the contents of the windows ISO (aka the files inside it, not the iso filesystem) to the filesystem.
I tend to find unetbootin and rufus break more ISOs then they actually help with though. Personally I find ventoy is the better approach overall, just copy the ISO as a file to the USB filesystem (and you can copy multiple ones as well).
Some people need everything to have a GUI. They evaporate as soon as they’re required to open the terminal.