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How to create a bootable Linux USB drive
(www.zdnet.com)
@jorge Been using this for a long time.
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.
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
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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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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?
Ventoy for life
Arch currently doesn't work with it :c
It doesn’t? Been a month or two since I updated the ISO but I’ve never had a problem
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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
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.
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.
Oh I know, I posted Zitron's article here on Lemmy myself just the other day lmao. Part of why it's on my mind.
Worst timeline? Could be...
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
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.
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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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.
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‘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.
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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!
I stand corrected then - welcome aboard! Linux is much easier to get into now than even just 5 years ago.
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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.
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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
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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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Unetbootin huh? Something tells me people capable of running a Linux-only application know how to make a Linux installer USB.
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
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this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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