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Bootable USB flash drive with Ubuntu. Bootable ubuntu flash drive: burning an iso image, installing UltraIso. Creating a bootable USB flash drive using UltraISO

In this article we will look at creating a bootable USB flash drive for Linux. Two programs will help us with this, which will automatically create bootable USB drives. The distribution is based on the Debian Wheezy operating system image.

If you are interested in information about creating a bootable USB flash drive for the Windows family of operating systems, then you can read the information at this link “how to make a bootable USB flash drive for Windows”.

BOOT FLASH DRIVE using the UNetbootin program (I method)

The program allows you to create both an online bootable USB drive with a distribution of Linux-like operating systems, and with an existing Linux distribution downloaded earlier. The program can be downloaded from the official website http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Attention: Before you start working with this program, you need to format the USB drive, it is advisable to select the FAT32 file system (default), see how to do this in the image below.

After formatting the Flash drive, run the program UNetbootin. As mentioned earlier, the program allows you to burn a Live CD/DVD from the Internet, indicating only the distribution and its version.

But we will not use this option for creating a bootable USB flash drive for Linux, since we have already downloaded the Debian Wheezy distribution from the official website. You can download the distribution and learn about installing the Debian OS in the article: “Installing DEBIAN Wheezy”.

In order to write a disk image of the Debian Wheezy operating system to a USB drive, you need to select the “Disk Image” radio button, then activate “ISO Standard” in the list, then specify the path to the distribution kit with the .ISO extension, and then select the device type and itself from the list carrier. The parameters have been selected, now click the “OK” button and the process of extracting and copying files will automatically begin, which may take a long time.

After extracting and copying the files, the program will install the bootloader and complete the installation with the prompt “Reboot now?” If you want to install Linux OS on the same computer, then you need to click the “Reboot now” button. After reboot, select the USB boot option in the BIOS.

Otherwise, if the Linux OS will be installed on another computer, then you need to click on the “Exit” button.

Bootable Linux flash drive is ready!!!

BOOT FLASH DRIVE using the Universal USB Installer program (II method)

Let's proceed to the second method of creating a bootable Linux flash drive using a program from foreign enthusiasts. Unlike the first method of creating bootable media, this program has the ability to format removable media yourself.

Continuing, we launch the program Universal USB Installer and configure it to the required parameters. The first step presents a list of Linux operating systems; select “Try Unlisted Linux ISO” - this means that we will use an operating system image not included in this list. In the second step, we need to specify the path to the location of our image; Debian Wheezy is an example to follow. The third step involves selecting a USB drive and activating the checkbox for formatting the flash drive. The settings are all done, click the “Create” button.

A window appears that says what you need to do: close all Windows windows, the program will format the USB drive, create an MBR boot area, change the volume label to the UUI name and install the Linux operating system image. We confirm “Yes”!

The process of installing data onto removable media has begun, we are waiting for some time...

...after a while, the program completes the installation process and will look like the image below.

A bootable Linux flash drive has been created! You can download the program from the official website: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

First, you need to understand the very concept of what is a bootable Linux flash drive? This topic is very popular; almost everything can be found on the Internet.

Option #1. Creating a bootable USB flash drive in UNetbootin

UNetbootin is a program for installing Linux without CD/DVD.

This utility allows you to install it on your computer or, otherwise, create a bootable Flash disk with special Linux/BSD distributions previously downloaded from the Internet.

Installation can be done either through Windows or Linux.

The program is installed on most Linux distributions, namely: Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, CentOS, Debian, Arch Linux, Mandriva, Slackware, FreeDOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and their varieties).

  • Before you start working with this utility, you need to format (clean) the USB drive; it is best to select the FAT32 file system. How to do this is shown in the illustration below:

  • After cleaning the Flash media, you need to run the UNetbootin program. As already mentioned, this program allows you to burn a DVD from the Internet, showing only the distribution and its version:

  • To write a disk image of the operating system (in the example, the downloaded distribution is Debian Wheezy, you can find any other) onto a USB drive, select the “Disk Image” item, then activate the “ISO Standard”, also do not forget to indicate the path to the distribution with the extension .ISO, and also indicate the type of device and the media itself (as shown in the figure).
    The characteristics have been selected, now you need to click the “OK” button, the procedure for extracting and duplicating files occurs automatically. This process will take 5-10 minutes.

  • After unpacking the necessary files, the program will automatically install the bootloader and notify you when the bootable USB flash drive is ready.
    If you wish, you can immediately install the Linux OS; to do this, you need to restart the computer and select in the BIOS to boot the system via a USB drive.

If installation is not required, then there is no point in restarting the computer; you should click on the “Exit” button. All! As you can see, it's not difficult at all.

Your bootable Linux flash drive is ready to go.

Option #2. Creating a bootable USB flash drive in Universal USB Installer

Unlike the first one, this program formats removable media spontaneously.

Let's look at this program in more detail.

  • You need to install and run the Universal USB Installer program.
  1. The first step shows a list of Linux operating systems. Select the Linux that you want to use on the flash drive; if the one you need is not there, then indicate “Try Unlisted Linux ISO”.
  2. The second step is to go to the pre-downloaded Linux distribution on your computer; if you did not select the folder yourself, then look for it in the Downloads folder.
  3. The third step is to indicate our flash drive, usually an H drive, followed by the name of your device.

We check everything again and click the “Create” button.

  • Next, a warning will appear telling you to close all unnecessary windows, close everything and click next.
    The program will automatically format the USB drive, create the MBR boot area, change the volume label to the UUI name and install the Linux operating system image. We only need to confirm the action by clicking on the “Yes” button.

  • Afterwards, the procedure for installing data on removable media is observed, as shown in the figure; literally in 5 minutes everything will be ready.

  • The program completes the installation process on its own, see the figure below.

That's it, another bootable Linux flash drive has been created!

Option #3. Creating a bootable USB flash drive using the Xboot utility

In this case, the option of creating it using the Xboot utility is considered.

This program does not require installation on a computer; it can be launched immediately by first downloading it from the Internet.

The interface of this utility is quite simple.

To add images, you need to transfer the iso files (Linux OS distributions) of each image to the main part of the program window, or click on File-open, as shown in the figure.

After the path to the image has been indicated, a window will open with the question: how to perceive this image?

Since we are making a bootable flash drive for Linux, we choose Utilitu - Ubuntu, but if you are making a flash drive for Windows!! select Add using Grub4dos ISO image Emulation.

Please note that the option to add Windows is selected by default.

A huge plus of this program is that, along with the system, you can install various antiviruses on a bootable USB flash drive, such as: Kaspersky Rescue Disc.

In the future, they will help protect your computer from Trojans, viruses and other nasty things.

Utilities that come with the program

As shown in the figure above, the program offers various utilities for both Linux OS and Windows.

Xboot is not installed on your computer, so all the utilities you select will be downloaded automatically from the Internet, you will only need to confirm all the steps, all steps are shown in the pictures.

To make it convenient for you to work with images, write a name for each. For example: Linux 1 WT, Linux 2 Mouse, Linux 3 Android.

Check all the steps again when everything is ready and if you are sure that you have not missed anything, then select the option to write to a USB drive (do not confuse making a bootable DVD), before use you need to clear the flash in FAT32.

If you don’t know English well, then find two buttons at the bottom of the window, when you click the Create ISO button you will make a bootable DVD, but we need to click – Create USB.

When you press the Create USB button, a window will pop up with the choice of a USB gadget for recording and selecting a bootloader; Syslinux, recommended for the current work, will automatically be selected.

If an error occurs, then change the bootloader to Grub4dos, it fully supports NTFS formatting.

Before clicking the OK button, you should accurately and carefully check whether the media has been selected so that the necessary information is not deleted from the portable hard drive by mistake.

After clicking OK, the same image creation operation will occur as when creating an ISO.

After loading from this flash drive is completed, an overview of a convenient menu pops up.

Here you can install the necessary operating system on your current computer, scan your hard drives for viruses, and much more.

You chose all these utilities yourself when creating the flash drive!

I hope our article helped you and now you know what a bootable USB flash drive is and most importantly, how to create it!

To learn more about the topic, you can watch the video on YouTube:

Creating a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela

Bootable Linux USB Flash Drive - Best Creation Options

A bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint may be needed to install the system on your computer or to get acquainted with it in Live mode. To begin with, you need to visit our website and then follow a simple sequence of actions that is described in this article.

Creating a bootable USB flash drive from Windows

If you have Windows 7, 8 or 10 installed on your computer, then you need to download a special program. Here you need to start from your final goals and where you will install the system. If you have new computers with UEFI, then you need to download the Rufus program. If you have older hardware, then the UNetbootin program will suffice. Let's look at the nuances of working with each program.

Creating a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint using Rufus

Connect the flash drive to your computer, delete all information from it and run the Rufus program. The following window will appear in front of you:

First, specify the path to the iso image on your hard drive, and then select the “GPT for computers with UEFI” partition scheme. You can leave the rest of the program settings as default and click on the “start” button. Wait until the image is written to the USB flash drive and close the program window.

Creating a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint using UNetbootin

UNetbootin is available for both Windows and Linux Mint. Connect the flash drive to the computer, delete all information from it and run the program. The following window will appear in front of you:

Specify the path to the Linux Mint image on your computer and select the media on which this image will be written. Click on the "ok" button and wait until the recording finishes.

As you can see, it’s very easy to write Linux Mint onto a flash drive, and in order to boot from it, you need to set the boot priority from removable media in the BIOS. The resulting installation flash drive will be able to run not only on your computer, but also on the computers of your friends, and you will be able to introduce them to our wonderful operating system. If you have any questions, ask them on our website.

Linux Mint is one of the popular distributions of this operating system, which is developed by the community. It is based on Ubuntu, which makes it friendly even to users with no Linux experience and at the same time quite flexible and easy to configure.

From this article you will learn how to create a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint in various operating systems using the software available for them and how to mark up a permanent storage partition on this flash drive to save user files, OS options and installed programs. In the final part of the article, we will briefly talk about customizing Linux Mint on a flash drive.

Creating a Bootable USB Flash Drive for Linux Mint

First we need to download the distribution we need. This can be done from the official website at https://linuxmint.com/download.php. You can choose from 32-bit and 64-bit images with various graphical environments: Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce and KDE. For this article we use the distribution with the first of them. Now let's look at creating a flash drive in two operating systems.

How to burn Linux Mint to a USB flash drive in Windows

Rufus is the most convenient program for recording Live images to USB devices, running on any version of Windows. Even the Ubuntu developers on the distribution's official website recommend using it. Rufus is easy to use and supports Russian language.

First of all, download the program itself from its website https://rufus.akeo.ie, a portable version is suitable for our purposes. Launch the downloaded file.

The USB flash drive was automatically detected, but if you have several USB storage devices connected at the same time, select the one you need from the list.

Click the optical drive icon and select the Linux Mint image file.

We see that the volume label was added automatically after this. You don’t need to change anything else in the settings, just click "Start".

A warning appears that the file is an ISOHybrid image. Leave the recommended mode and just click “OK”.

Check to see if there are any files on the flash drive that need to be transferred to your hard drive. If there is no important information there, then when further pop-up warnings appear, click "OK".

We are waiting for the process to complete. That's it - the creation of a bootable Linux Mint flash drive is complete.

How to make a bootable Linux Mint USB flash drive in Linux

A very simple way is to use a GUI utility called Etcher. First, download the utility archive from etcher.io. Linux builds of this program are distributed in the AppImage format, which contains executable files and does not require installation. In any distribution, it is enough to unpack this file from the archive and run it by double-clicking.

Click "Select Image" and select the image file.

If more than one flash drive is connected to your computer, you can select the one you need by clicking "Change" under the external hard drive icon. Next click "Flash!", enter the administrator password and wait for the end of recording and verification of files. Ready!

Another option for recording an image. First, we need to find out what device ID is assigned to the flash drive we need. Open a terminal and write:

The required flash drive can be found by size in gigabytes. In this example it is /dev/sdb.

sudo dd bs=4M if=path_to_image_file of=/dev/sdb(device identifier) ​​status=progress

In this example, this line would look like

sudo dd bs=4M if=~/Downloads/linuxmint-18.3-cinnamon-32bit.iso of=/dev/sdb status=progress

Once the copying is complete, the Linux Mint bootable USB flash drive will be ready.

Setting up persistent storage

The portable system on USB-Flash is quite useful. You can boot from it to work on any computer, and, if necessary, install Linux on it. But there is one drawback: any changes made to the system, created files and installed programs will not be saved when restarted. One way to solve this problem is to simply install Linux on a flash drive like you would on a regular hard drive. But this solution has many disadvantages:

  • Pocket USB drives are not optimized for handling many small files.
  • The installation will take a very long time.
  • The main feature of LiveUSB is lost - installing an operating system from it.

In order to combine the advantages of the two solutions, you can create a separate partition on a flash drive in which user data will be saved. We will do this from Linux using the Gparted and MultiSystem programs. First you need to install them.

Gparted is installed on the system by typing the command in the terminal

sudo apt-get install gparted

MultiSystem is installed with the following lines:

sudo apt-add-repository "deb http://liveusb.info/multisystem/depot all main"
wget -q -O - http://liveusb.info/multisystem/depot/multisystem.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt update

sudo apt install multisystem

Launch Gparted. In the upper right corner, select our flash drive (here - dev/sdb/).

If there is some section or several, right-click on each of them and click first "Unmount", and then "Delete".

This will be the partition for the OS image. We specify the size as 2500, select fat32 as the file system. Confirm the dialogue with the button "Add".

Further also through the command "New" We create a permanent storage partition on the remaining unallocated space. It can be expanded to cover all free space on a flash drive; it is best to use it as a file system ext2. But the most important thing here is to be sure to set the disk label casper-rw.

Next, select the menu item "Edit" -> "Apply All Operations", click “Apply” to agree to delete data from the flash drive, wait for the procedures to complete and close Gparted. After this, you need to pull out the flash drive and insert it back so that the new partitions are mounted. Now we launch Multisystem, select our device there and click "Confirm".

The program will write that the main partition label is not assigned and ask after clicking "OK" Pull out and insert the flash drive again. Let's do it.

Launch Multisystem again and press again "OK", agreeing to install the Grub boot loader.

The program has started. Click on the CD icon at the bottom left, select the image file, enter the administrator password and wait for the copying to complete.

Again, select the name of the image, write in the empty input field persistent and click “Backup”. Enter the administrator password again and wait for the process to complete.

That's it, now you know how to make a bootable Linux Mint flash drive with the ability to save user data.

Setting up Linux Mint on a flash drive

Next, you can start setting up the resulting LiveUSB. To do this, reboot the computer and boot from it. The first step is to translate the environment into Russian. Open the start menu -> "Preferences" -> "Languages".

A window like this appears.

In it, select “Install / Remove Languages...”, in the next window click "Add...", looking in the list "Russian, Russia UTF-8" and confirm the installation with the button "Install".

The initial window opens again, but now in the lists of languages ​​and regions we change the American flag to Russian and click "Apply System-Wide".

Reboot the computer. We are greeted with a proposal to translate the names of folders with personal files into Russian. You can agree ( "Update Names"), or you can leave them in English ( "Keep Old Names").

The system is Russified. Next, you need to install the software you need. For example, let's install the beloved Chromium browser (the open source version of Chrome). Go to the start menu -> "Administration" -> "Program Manager".

A convenient application opens, which is not difficult to understand.

In the same way, you can select from the catalog and install any other software you need.

conclusions

It turned out to be not at all difficult to write Linux Mint to a flash drive, just follow the instructions. And if you mark up a persistent partition when creating a LiveUSB, then when booting from such a flash drive you can save OS settings and user files, and install additional programs. To Russify the OS, a few clicks are also enough, because Mint is a friendly and easy-to-use system that natively supports the Russian language.

Optical discs are already a thing of the past. The same as floppy disks and other similar storage devices. Now flash drives and external drives rule. They are convenient to use for installing systems, so today we will look at how you can use a 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 OSes).

Creating a bootable USB flash drive using the Rufus utility

The program itself can be downloaded from the link. The latest version of the Ubuntu distribution is .

  • Connect the USB flash drive to your computer and run the program:
  • Select the flash drive to record to:

  • Check the boxes: “Quick format”, “Create bootable disk”, then in the drop-down list set the ISO image value:

  • Select the Ubuntu or other distribution image using the button:

  • Click the Start button to start recording:

All that remains is to wait until the end of the rewrite and restart the computer.

Creating a bootable USB flash drive using the UNetbootin utility

  • Use the Select Image button to select the desired image:

  • Use the Flash button to record. And no housework :)

Creating a bootable USB flash drive using UltraISO

This is a more serious, multifunctional and paid program. Let's take it. It can do a lot, but now we are interested in writing an image to a flash drive.

  • Connect the USB flash drive to your computer and launch the program.
  • Select Boot->Burn Hard Disk Image:

  • In the window that appears, you need to select the image file and logical drive of your drive.

Of course, these are not all utilities. There are many more interesting ones, but for starters, we think this will be enough. Don't go far, we will show you how to install Ubuntu step by step.