Create ubuntu usb on linux

Introduction

Ubuntu can be installed from a USB flash drive. This may be necessary for most new portable computers without DVD drives and is handy for others because a USB flash drive is so convenient. Also, you can configure Ubuntu on the USB flash drive to save changes you make, unlike a read-only CD/DVD disk.

Booting from a USB flash drive created with usb-creator alias Startup Disk Creator and mkusb will behave just as if you had booted from the install CD. It will show the language selection and then the install menu, from which you can install Ubuntu onto the computer’s hard drive or launch the LiveCD environment. Other utilities, e.g. UNetbootin, may create slightly different boot drives or if on UEFI might not work at all with Debian iso files due to a bug

Note: This article uses the term «USB flash drive» alongside USB stick, USB drive, USB device, USB pendrive and thumb drive.

Prerequisites

• a 4 GB USB flash device/drive/stick. If the iso file is smaller than 2 GB, it is possible to use a 2 GB USB device, at least with some of the methods. Files on this USB device will be erased, so backup the files you want to keep before making the device bootable. Some of the tools require that this USB device is properly formatted and mounted while other tools will overwrite whatever is on the target device. Please follow the instructions for each tool.
• an Ubuntu flavour ISO file downloaded from an official web page, ubuntu.com/download or http://releases.ubuntu.com, stored in your running computer (for example in the directory Downloads in the internal drive, not in the USB flash drive that you want to make into a USB boot drive).
• Check with md5sum (or another checksum tool) that the download was good. In Linux there is the tool ‘md5sum’. In Windows you can do it with Rufus: click on the circle with a tick mark (more about Rufus here.)

Dummy headlines

After a major remake of this help page the following headlines are kept here because they may be linked to from other web sites. Several other headlines further down in the page are also kept for this reason.

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Create a bootable USB stick on Ubuntu

Creating a bootable Ubuntu USB stick is very simple, especially from Ubuntu itself, and we’re going to cover the process in the next few steps.

Alternatively, we also have tutorials to help you create a bootable USB stick from both Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS.

2. Requirements

• A 4GB or larger USB stick/flash drive
• Ubuntu Desktop 14.04 or later installed
• An Ubuntu ISO file. See Get Ubuntu for download links

3. Launch Startup Disk Creator

We’re going to use an application called ‘Startup Disk Creator’ to write the ISO image to your USB stick. This is installed by default on Ubuntu, and can be launched as follows:

1. Insert your USB stick (select ‘Do nothing’ if prompted by Ubuntu)
2. On Ubuntu 18.04 and later, use the bottom left icon to open ‘Show Applications’
3. In older versions of Ubuntu, use the top left icon to open the dash
4. Use the search field to look for Startup Disk Creator
5. Select Startup Disk Creator from the results to launch the application

4. ISO and USB selection

When launched, Startup Disk Creator will look for the ISO files in your Downloads folder, as well as any attached USB storage it can write to.

It’s likely that both your Ubuntu ISO and the correct USB device will have been detected and set as ‘Source disc image’ and ‘Disk to use’ in the application window. If not, use the ‘Other’ button to locate your ISO file and select the exact USB device you want to use from the list of devices.

Click Make Startup Disk to start the process.

5. Confirm USB device

Before making any permanent changes, you will be asked to confirm the USB device you’ve chosen is correct. This is important because any data currently stored on this device will be destroyed.

After confirming, the write process will start and a progress bar appears.

6. Installation complete

That’s it! You now have Ubuntu on a USB stick, bootable and ready to go.

If you want to install Ubuntu, take a look at our install Ubuntu desktop tutorial.

Finding help

If you get stuck, help is always at hand:

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Creating a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from Ubuntu

Install and run Startup Disk Creator alias usb-creator

• The Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator is dedicated to creating USB boot drives for Ubuntu and Ubuntu family flavours (Kubuntu, Lubuntu . Xubuntu).
• Use another tool (e.g. ‘Unetbootin’ or ‘mkusb’), if you want to create a USB boot drive with another Linux distro (alias Linux operating system).

• Insert and mount the USB drive. Inserting the USB drive should auto-mount it.
• Start the Startup Disk Creator
• In the top pane of the Startup Disk Creator, pick the .iso file that you downloaded.
• If the .iso file isn’t listed, click «Other» to locate and select the .iso file that you downloaded.
• In the bottom pane of the Startup Disk Creator, pick the target device, the USB flash drive. If more than one choice, please check carefully, until you are sure that you will be writing to the correct device.
• After checking that you are pointing to the correct target device, the USB flash drive, you can start the action.
• You must enter a password because this is a risky operation. Use the password of the current user ID (the same as for login and running tasks with 'sudo'.

The Startup Disk Creator clones the iso file, which means that you need neither erase nor format the target drive. It will be completely overwritten anyway by the cloning process. The Startup Disk Creator looks like this in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS:

• NEVER try to use one of your hard disk drives or SSDs or partitions in this process unless you really know what you are doing, as data will get erased.
• There are bugs that affect the Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator, when you run it in old Ubuntu versions (e.g. 12.04 LTS, 14.04 LTS, 15.10) in BIOS mode and try to create USB boot drives with other versions. Some of the bugs are caused by conflicts between different versions of ‘syslinux’. These bugs do not affect installing in UEFI mode, where grub2 is used. And with the Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator version 0.3.2 in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, these bugs are no longer a problem, so you can install any version of the Ubuntu flavours from 16.04 LTS.
• The Startup Disk Creator is dedicated to creating USB boot drives for Ubuntu and Ubuntu family flavours (Kubuntu, Lubuntu . Xubuntu).
• Use another tool (e.g. ‘Unetbootin’ or ‘mkusb’), if you want to create a USB boot drive with another Linux distro.
• If you want to clone from a general image file to a drive, you can use mkusb. It lets you clone to any drive that is not busy, also an internal drive, and there are very obvious warnings to prevent mistakes.

Unetbootin

You can get Unetbootin for Linux via this link: unetbootin.sourceforge.net

Unetbootin should also work well in Ubuntu, when installed via the developer’s ppa. (The version in the Ubuntu repositories might not be up to date and should not be used.)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gezakovacs/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install unetbootin

If you are using UEFI, there are/were problems to use Unetbootin with some Debian versions due to a bug.

Start Unetbootin, select an ISO file or a distribution to download, select a target drive (USB drive or Hard Disk), select persistence if you wish, then reboot once done. If your USB drive doesn’t show up, reformat it as FAT32. Mount the FAT32 partition (for example by un-plugging and re-plugging the drive).

If you don’t reboot, because you want to use the USB flash drive in another computer, unmount (eject) the FAT32 partition before unplugging it, otherwise you might corrupt the file system.

mkusb — dd image of iso file to USB device safely

• If you want to clone from a general image file to a drive, you can use mkusb. It lets you clone to any drive that is not busy, also an internal drive, and there are very obvious warnings to prevent mistakes.
• mkusb can also
  • run in Debian and many linux distros that are similar to Ubuntu and Debian,
  • clone from iso files of most Linux distros to create USB boot drives,
  • create persistent live drives of the Ubuntu family and Debian,
  • restore a USB boot drive to a standard storage device.

  Simple, safe, high success rate

  The mkusb tool was developed to make it simpler and safer to create boot drives with the method to flash or clone an iso image or a compressed image file. It is using dd under the hood.The target is a mass storage device, often but not always a USB drive, sometimes a memory card, an internal drive or an eSATA drive.

  Cloning an iso file to a mass storage device makes a boot drive, provided it is a hybrid iso file, post-processed with isohybrid. Most modern linux distros provide hybrid iso files.

  The cloning method with dd has a high success rate.

  Quick start manual and mkusb PPA

  The fastest way to start making USB boot drives is to install the mkusb PPA, install and update the mkusb package like all the other program packages. See this link

  If you run standard Ubuntu, you need an extra instruction to get the repository Universe. (Kubuntu, Lubuntu . Xubuntu have the repository Universe activated automatically.)

  sudo add-apt-repository universe # only for standard Ubuntu

  Otherwise the following three command lines are enough to install mkusb.

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/ppa # and press Enter sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install mkusb

  mkusb — wiki page

  mkusb is described with more details at the following wiki page

  mkusb — persistent live drives

  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb/plug: mkusb-plug — very safe plug-in method to identify the target device (the USB flash drive)

  Installation/FromUSBStick/fromUbuntu (последним исправлял пользователь nio-wiklund 2020-01-24 08:34:23)

  The material on this wiki is available under a free license, see Copyright / License for details
  You can contribute to this wiki, see Wiki Guide for details

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