Create a Bootable Linux USB Flash Drive on Ubuntu

Would you like to learn how to create a bootable Linux USB Stick on Ubuntu Linux? In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to download a Linux ISO image and create a bootable flash drive on Ubuntu Linux version 17.

Hardware List:

The following section presents the list of equipment used to create this Ubuntu Linux tutorial.

Every piece of hardware listed above can be found at Amazon website.

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Tutorial - Bootable Linux USB Stick on Ubuntu

On the Linux console, use the following commands download a Linux ISO image.

# mkdir /downloads
# cd /downloads
# wget http://ubuntu.mirror.pop-sc.rnp.br/ubuntu-releases/17.10.1/ubuntu-17.10.1-server-amd64.iso

In our example, We downloaded the Ubuntu Linux server version 17.10.

After finishing the download, connect the USB flash drive to the computer.

Use the lsblk command to list the block devices connected to the computer.

You need to look at the list of presented devices and detect the USB stick identification name.

# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 1.8T 0 disk
+-sda1 8:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
+-sda2 8:2 0 1.8T 0 part /
sdb 8:16 1 29.1G 0 disk
+-sdb1 8:17 1 29.1G 0 part

In our example, the 30GB USB stick was detected as the SDB device.

First, let's format the USB flash drive or USB Sticker.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1

Now, let's create the Linux bootable USB stick.

# dd if=/downloads/ubuntu-17.10.1-server-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

The system will start to create a bootable USB stick using the Ubuntu Linux image.

This process can take a while.

After the process is finished, you should remove the USB stick.

Now, you could try to boot another computer using your band new bootable Linux USB Stick.