Linux from usb flash drive

3 Ways To Boot Ubuntu Linux From a USB Flash Drive

In this article we’ll see 3 way of installing Ubuntu on a USB drive.
We’ll see how to create a live USB Ubuntu disk, just like your live CD. Only difference is that we’ll be booting and installing Ubuntu using this live USB diskette, and as last option how to do a full installation of ubuntu on your USB drive.

Option 1: Boot Ubuntu as a Live CD from a USB Flash Drive

Use this option to install Ubuntu as a Live Install, which allows you to boot from the USB flash drive in Ubuntu, experience the Linux environment but will not retain any changes or settings after you shut down. This is a great way to get a feel for the OS, test some of it’s capabilities as well as typical hardware compatibility.

Programs you may need to download:

Ubuntu 10.04 (soon 10.10) Live CD ISO available at ubuntu.com

Universal USB Installer available at pendrivelinux.com

What you will need:

Running Windows XP/Vista/7

Fat32 Formatted USB 2.0 Flash Drive, at least 1GB

PC with a Bios that can boot from USB

Now with all of the necessary components in place, we can begin to setup our Ubuntu Live USB Drive.

1. Run the Universal USB Installer by Pendrivelinux.com that you downloaded earlier.

2. Choose Ubuntu 9.10/10.04.1 Desktop i386

3. Select the Ubuntu Live CD that you downloaded earlier

4. Choose your Flash Drive

5. In this instance, we are going leave the persistence option unchecked.

This can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes depending on the speed of your system. At one point the progress bar will freeze until it is done, and this is the lengthiest wait of the process.

Once complete, you can reboot your computer with the USB flash drive in the USB port, press F12 for the Boot Menu and choose the removable media to boot from and you are in.

As this is a Live USB, any changes you make to the Ubuntu environment will not persist through a reboot. This is because running in this mode, Ubuntu uses available RAM in place of Swap and Hard Disk space. This option also contains the install files needed to install Ubuntu directly to your desktop if you should so desire.

Option 2: Boot Ubuntu as a Live CD with Persistence from a USB Flash Drive

This option will install Ubuntu Linux onto your flash drive with an area for persistent storage. You will be able to restart the computer, boot back into the Linux environment and all settings or changes made previously will persist.

NOTE: This option is particularly hard on Flash Memory, as there can be quite a bit of reading and writing to the Flash Memory.

What you will need:

Running Windows XP/Vista/7

Fat32 Formatted USB 2.0 Flash Drive, at least 2GB

PC with a Bios that can boot from USB

Now with all of the necessary components in place, we can begin to setup our Ubuntu Live USB Drive.

1. Run the Universal USB Installer by Pendrivelinux.com that you downloaded earlier.

2. Choose Ubuntu 9.10/10.04.1 Desktop i386

3. Select the Ubuntu Live CD that you downloaded earlier

4. Choose your Flash Drive

5. Select the Persistence Option of 1GB Casper-RW

This can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes depending on the speed of your system. At one point the progress bar will freeze until it is done, and this is the lengthiest wait of the process.

Once complete, you can reboot your computer with the USB flash drive in the USB port, press F12 for the Boot Menu and choose the removable media to boot from and you are in.

As this is a Live USB with Persistence, any changes you make to the Ubuntu environment will keep through a reboot. This option also contains the install files needed to install Ubuntu directly to your desktop if you should so desire.

Option 3: Install Ubuntu directly to a USB flash Drive

This option works through installing Ubuntu to the flash drive as a complete installation. It does not retain the installation files to install on another system. This will allow you to use Ubuntu exactly as if it were installed alone on the hard disk. You can boot from it with any computer that can boot from a USB flash drive.

Note: This method requires that you disable your hard drive in BIOS to prevent overwriting your current operating system and force the install onto the USB drive.

What you will need:

USB 2.0 Flash Drive, at least 4GB

PC with a BIOS that can boot from USB

A Computer with the ability to Burn CD/DVD

Now with all of the necessary components in place, we can begin the process.

1. First, you will need to burn your Ubuntu ISO to CD using a program like ImgBurn available at ImgBurn.com

2. Boot your computer and press F2 to enter the system BIOS. Within here you will want to disable your Hard Drive. If this is not an option in your BIOS, I would suggest shutting down your computer and unplugging the power and data cables from your hard drive before proceeding. NOTE: If you choose not to disable your hard drive, you run the risk of installing Ubuntu on top of your current OS and can lose valuable information.

3. After you have disabled your hard drive, place the Ubuntu Live CD into your computer and boot from this.

4. At the initial boot screen, choose to try Ubuntu, not install.

5. Once Ubuntu loads, plug in the desired flash drive into the computer.

6. Now, double click on the Install Ubuntu icon that appears on the desktop.

7. The first 3 screens are language, time zone, and keyboard layout.

8. Now Ubuntu will notify you that there is a disk mounted, and asks to unmount it. This is your flash drive. Give it permission to unmount.

9. This is the prepare disk space screen. I chose to leave mine at default and let the installer handle the partitions needed by Linux.

10. Now you will see the login and user information screen.

11. Now you are ready to install, click install.

12. At one point during the installation, you may notice a skip button appear on the bottom left. This is to skip the auto update, and finally the language packs. I chose to skip language packs update.

13. This may take a while, mine took atbout 35 minutes to complete. When it is done, eject the disk and shut down the computer. Plug your hard drive back in if necessary, or boot your computer into bios and re-enable it. Reboot your computer and press F12 to enter the boot menu, choose the flash drive and boot into Ubuntu.

About the Author

Joshua Bulman is a full time web designer and IT support technician for a company that provides custom USB drives via the web marketplace. He enjoys reading fiction, writing just about anything, and discovering new technologies.

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USB flash installation medium

This page discusses various multi-platform methods on how to create an Arch Linux Installer USB drive (also referred to as «flash drive», «USB stick», «USB key», etc) for booting in BIOS and UEFI systems. The result will be a Live USB (Live CD-like) system that can be used for installing Arch Linux, system maintenance or for recovery purposes, and that, because of using Overlayfs for / , will discard all changes once the computer shuts down.

If you would like to run a full install of Arch Linux from a USB drive (i.e. with persistent settings), see Install Arch Linux on a removable medium. If you would like to use your bootable Arch Linux USB stick as a rescue USB, see Change root.

Contents

Using the ISO as is (BIOS and UEFI)

In GNU/Linux

Using basic command line utilities

This method is recommended due to its simplicity and universal availability, since these tools are part of coreutils (pulled in by the base meta-package).

Run the following command, replacing /dev/sdx with your drive, e.g. /dev/sdb . (Do not append a partition number, so do not use something like /dev/sdb1 ):

• using cat :
• using cp :
• using dd :
• using tee :

See [1] and [2] for a comparison and perspective on the use of those tools and why dd may be the least adapted one.

Using GNOME Disk Utility

Linux distributions running GNOME can easily make a live CD through nautilus and gnome-disk-utility . Simply right-click on the .iso file, and select Open With Disk Image Writer. When GNOME Disk Utility opens, specify the flash drive from the Destination drop-down menu and click Start Restoring.

Using MultiWriter

gnome-multi-writer is a simple GTK3 based graphical tool to write an ISO file to one or multiple USB devices at once.

Using Kindd

Kindd is a Qt based graphical frontend for dd. It is available as kindd AUR .

Using Popsicle

Popsicle is a tool made for flashing ISO files to multiple USB devices in parallel by the PopOS development team. It is written in Rust and uses GTK. It is available as popsicle AUR .

Using SUSE Studio ImageWriter

SUSE Studio ImageWriter is a Qt based tool made by the OpenSUSE development team. It is available as imagewriter AUR .

Using xorriso-dd-target

xorriso-dd-target (from libisoburn ) is a shell script which attempts to reduce the risk of overwriting the wrong storage device. Its safest mode is named -plug_test . For example, to use it as a regular user who can elevate to root using sudo:

In Windows

Using win32diskimager

win32diskimager is another graphical USB iso writing tool for Windows. Simply select your iso image and the target USB drive letter (you may have to format it first to assign it a drive letter), and click Write.

Using USBwriter

This method does not require any workaround and is as straightforward as dd under Linux. Just download the Arch Linux ISO, and with local administrator rights use the USBwriter utility to write to your USB flash memory.

Using Rufus

Rufus is a multi-purpose USB ISO writer. It provides a graphical user interface and does not care if the drive is properly formatted or not.

Simply select the Arch Linux ISO, the USB drive you want to create the bootable Arch Linux onto and click START.

Using Cygwin

Make sure your Cygwin installation contains the dd package.

Place your image file in your home directory:

Run cygwin as administrator (required for cygwin to access hardware). To write to your USB drive use the following command:

where archlinux-version-x86_64.iso is the path to the iso image file within the cygwin directory and \\.\x: is your USB flash drive where x is the windows designated letter, e.g. \\.\d: .

On Cygwin 6.0, find out the correct partition with:

and write the ISO image with the information from the output. Example:

dd for Windows

A GPL licensed dd version for Windows is available at http://www.chrysocome.net/dd. The advantage of this over Cygwin is a smaller download. Use it as shown in instructions for Cygwin above.

To begin, download the latest version of dd for Windows. Once downloaded, extract the archive’s contents into Downloads or elsewhere.

Now, launch your command prompt as an administrator. Next, change directory ( cd ) into the Downloads directory.

If your Arch Linux ISO is elsewhere you may need to state the full path, for convenience you may wish to put the Arch Linux ISO into the same folder as the dd executable. The basic format of the command will look like this.

Simply replace the various null spots (indicated by an «x») with the correct date and correct drive letter. Here is a complete example.

Using flashnul

flashnul is an utility to verify the functionality and maintenance of Flash-Memory (USB-Flash, IDE-Flash, SecureDigital, MMC, MemoryStick, SmartMedia, XD, CompactFlash etc).

From a command prompt, invoke flashnul with -p , and determine which device index is your USB drive, e.g.:

When you have determined which device is the correct one, you can write the image to your drive, by invoking flashnul with the device index, -L , and the path to your image, e.g:

As long as you are really sure you want to write the data, type yes, then wait a bit for it to write. If you get an access denied error, close any Explorer windows you have open.

If under Vista or Win7, you should open the console as administrator, or else flashnul will fail to open the stick as a block device and will only be able to write via the drive handle windows provides

In macOS

Using macOS dd

First, you need to identify the USB device. Open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal and list all storage devices with the command:

Your USB device will appear as something like /dev/disk2 (external, physical) . Verify that this is the device you want to erase by checking its name and size and then use its identifier for the commands below instead of /dev/diskX.

A USB device is normally auto-mounted in macOS, and you have to unmount (not eject) it before block-writing to it with dd . In Terminal, do:

Now copy the ISO image file to the device. The dd command is similar to its Linux counterpart, but notice the ‘r’ before ‘disk’ for raw mode which makes the transfer much faster:

This command will run silently. To view progress, send SIGINFO by pressing Ctrl+t . Note diskX here should not include the s1 suffix, or else the USB device will only be bootable in UEFI mode and not legacy. After completion, macOS may complain that «The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer». Select ‘Ignore’. The USB device will be bootable.

In Android

EtchDroid

EtchDroid is a OS image flasher for Android. It works without root permissions on Android 5 to Android 8. According to bug reports it does not always work on Android 9 and Android 4.4.

To create an Arch Linux installer, download the ISO image file on your Android device. Plug the USB drive to your device, using a USB-OTG adapter if needed. Open EtchDroid, select «Flash raw image», select your Arch ISO, then select your USB drive. Grant the USB API permission and confirm.

Keep your phone on a table while it is writing the image: a lot of USB-OTG adapters are a bit wobbly and you might unplug it by mistake.

Using manual formatting

BIOS and UEFI

In GNU/Linux

This method is more complicated than writing the image directly with dd , but it does keep the flash drive usable for data storage (that is, the ISO is installed in a specific partition within the already partitioned device without altering other partitions).

• If not done yet, create a partition table on /dev/sdX .
• If not done yet, create a partition on the device. The partition /dev/sdXn must be formatted to FAT32.
• Mount the FAT32 file system located in the USB flash device and extract the contents of the ISO image to it. For example:

Booting requires specifying the volume on which the files reside. By default the label ARCH_YYYYMM (with the appropriate release year and month) is used. Thus, the file system’s label has to be set accordingly. Alternatively, you can change this behaviour by altering the lines ending by archisolabel=ARCH_YYYYMM in the files:

• BIOS boot: /mnt/syslinux/archiso_sys-linux.cfg
• UEFI boot: /mnt/loader/entries/01-archiso-x86_64-linux.conf , /mnt/loader/entries/02-archiso-x86_64-speech-linux.conf and /mnt/loader/entries/03-archiso-x86_64-ram-linux.conf

To use an UUID instead, replace those portions of lines with archisodevice=/dev/disk/by-uuid/YOUR-UUID .

Syslinux files for BIOS systems are already copied to /mnt/syslinux . Unmount the FAT file system, install the syslinux and mtools packages and run the following commands to make the partition bootable:

In Windows

• Partition and format the USB drive using Rufus USB partitioner. Select partition scheme option as MBR for BIOS and UEFI and File system as FAT32. Uncheck «Create a bootable disk using ISO image» and «Create extended label and icon files» options.
• Change the Volume Label of the USB flash drive X: to match the LABEL mentioned in the archisolabel= part in \loader\entries\archiso-x86_64.conf . This step is required for Official ISO (Archiso). This step can be also performed using Rufus, during the prior «partition and format» step.
• Extract the ISO (similar to extracting ZIP archive) to the USB flash drive using 7-Zip.
• Download official Syslinux 6.xx binaries (zip file) from https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/ and extract it. The version of Syslinux should be the same version used in the ISO image.

• Run the following command (in Windows cmd prompt, as admin):

• Install Syslinux to the USB by running (use win64\syslinux64.exe for x64 Windows):

BIOS only

In GNU/Linux

Making a USB-ZIP drive

For some old BIOS systems, only booting from USB-ZIP drives is supported. This method allows you to still boot from a USB-HDD drive.

• Download syslinux and mtools from the official repositories.
• Find your usb drive with lsblk .
• Type mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdx 0 64 32 (replace x with the letter of your drive). This will take a while.

From here continue with the manual formatting method. The partition will be /dev/sdx4 due to the way ZIP drives work.

UEFI only

For UEFI-only booting, it is enough to copy the files from the ISO and either change the FAT volume’s label or edit boot loader configuration files to set archisolabel / archisodevice accordingly.

In GNU/Linux

This method involves simply copies files from the ISO image to a USB flash drive and either adjusts the systemd-boot configuration or the file system’s label.

1. If not done yet, create a partition table on /dev/sdX and a partition ( /dev/sdXn ) on the device.
2. If not done yet, format the partition to FAT32:
3. Mount the FAT32 file system:
4. Extract the ISO image to the mounted file system:
5. Either:
   • edit /mnt/loader/entries/archiso-x86_64-linux.conf and /mnt/loader/entries/archiso-x86_64-speech-linux.conf and change archisolabel=ARCH_YYYYMM to match your device, e.g. by replacing it with archisodevice=/dev/disk/by-uuid/YOUR-UUID ,
   • or unmount the file system and change its LABEL to match ARCH_YYYYMM :
6. Unmount the FAT32 file system.

In Windows

1. Partition the USB flash drive and format it to FAT32.
2. Right click on archlinux-version-x86_64.iso and select Mount.
3. Navigate to the newly created DVD drive and copy all files and folders except for syslinux to the USB flash drive.
4. When done copying, right click on the DVD drive and select Eject.
5. Either:
   • edit X:\loader\entries\archiso-x86_64-linux.conf and X:\loader\entries\archiso-x86_64-speech-linux.conf with a text editor and change archisolabel=ARCH_YYYYMM to match your device, e.g. by replacing it with archisolabel=YOUR-LABEL ,
   • or change the FAT32 volume label to match ARCH_YYYYMM .
6. Eject the USB flash drive.

Using a multiboot USB drive

This allows booting multiple ISOs from a single USB device, including the archiso. Updating an existing USB drive to a more recent ISO is simpler than for most other methods. See Multiboot USB drive.

Using ventoy

Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With ventoy, you do not need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them. It is available as ventoy-bin AUR .

In Windows

Loading the installation medium from RAM

This article or section is a candidate for merging with Multiboot USB drive#Using Syslinux and memdisk.

This method uses Syslinux and a Ramdisk (MEMDISK) to load the entire Arch Linux ISO image into RAM. Since this will be running entirely from system memory, you will need to make sure the system you will be installing this on has an adequate amount. A minimum amount of RAM between 500 MB and 1 GB should suffice for a MEMDISK based, Arch Linux install.

For more information on Arch Linux system requirements as well as those for MEMDISK see the Installation guide and here. For reference, here is the preceding forum thread.

Preparing the USB flash drive

Begin by formatting the USB flash drive as FAT32. Then create the following folders on the newly formatted drive.

Copy the needed files to the USB flash drive

Next copy the ISO that you would like to boot to the Boot/ISOs folder. After that, extract from the following files from the latest release of syslinux from here and copy them into the following folders.

• ./win32/syslinux.exe to the Desktop or Downloads folder on your system.
• ./memdisk/memdisk to the Settings folder on your USB flash drive.

Create the configuration file

After copying the needed files, navigate to the USB flash drive, /boot/Settings and create a syslinux.cfg file.

For more information see the Syslinux article.

Final steps

Finally, create a *.bat file where syslinux.exe is located and run it («Run as administrator» if you are on Vista or Windows 7):

Inadvisable methods

Using etcher

etcher contains analytics and first-party advertising. See [3], [4] and [5].

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