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How to create a bootable Linux USB drive (www.zdnet.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 99 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 42 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (11 children)

    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.

    https://rufus.ie/en/

    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?

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  • [–] 40 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Ventoy for life

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  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    For Linux you don't need a GUI tool, most how tos just dd the ISO onto the USB medium, e.g.

    sudo dd if=<file> of=<device> bs=16M status=progress oflag=sync

    like described in the Debian FAQs

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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

    By design. The longer you're Googling, the more ads they can sell.

    ...Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't remember where, but i read that this method only works because linux distributors "abuse" the ISO format to allow this. If I remember right, it's not possible to use this ISOs on regular disks

    Of course the command you provided is right and it's what I use, it's just a fun fact

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Yes and no, it's the other way round. The ISOs often are hybrid images which you can burn onto a CD/DVD or dd onto a USB pen drive. Until approximately 10-15 years ago, if I remember correctly, the distributed Linux ISOs where standard not hybrid images, thus you always needed some other program to create bootable USB media.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    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).

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    qrmu-debootstrap is also super useful if you want to customize and image for a different architecture (for example building custom RPi images).

    Super useful information, thanks!

    EDIT: Is this anything like the isorespinner.sh? I've previously used that to get Linux on an RCA Cambio W101 because it needed a fancy ISO since it has a 32-bit bootloader and a 64-bit CPU.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    I believe the script you are talking about repackages an existing iso. Debootstick builds one from scratch by pulling all the necessary packages from the repository.

    For the underlying process of creating this image it uses debootstrap which is the standard Debian way of creating a full system installation (minus the whole bootloader and iso shenanigans). Debootstick allows most options from debootstrap (aka selecting a distro, release, mirror, extra packages, etc).

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 31 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Uh yeah OK, I doubt anyone in c/linux didn't know how to do this already

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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!

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    • [–] 23 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    I use Rufus. It just works.

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    [–] 20 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    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

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    [–] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I would like to install a distro on a USB stick, without it doing something stupid to my internal drive's EFI.

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    [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Unetbootin huh? Something tells me people capable of running a Linux-only application know how to make a Linux installer USB.

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    • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    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

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