Usb imaging tool linux

Create Bootable USB Drive With USBImager In Linux

Since the conception of Linux, so many of flavors in Linux operating systems are developed. Most of them can be downloaded from the internet. The downloaded Linux OS is usually a bootable ISO image. You can write it to either a CD or DVD or USB depending on the size of the ISO image. Nowadays, most of us use USB mass storage devices to write the bootable ISO images in Linux and Unix-like systems. There are many applications available to create bootable USB disks in Linux and each application has its own set of distinctive features. Today, we will discuss about one such tool called USBImager.

What is USBImager?

USBImager is a simple graphical application used to write the ISO images as well as compressed disk images to USB drives. Compared to its counterparts, USBImager is really really small. The size of this tiny application is around 170~ kb only. It doesn’t have any dependencies either.

It makes synchronized writes, meaning, all data is on disk when the progress bar reaches 100%. It can verify writing by comparing the disk to images.

USBImager can read the RAW images, such as .img , .bin , .raw , .iso , .dd , etc., compressed images, such as .gz , .bz2 , .xz , .zst etc., and archive files such zip (PKZIP and ZIP64).

We can also create the backup of the entire USB drive. It is even possible to create compressed backups in raw and bzip2 formats. USBImager has an option to let the users to choose whether the backup should be compressed or not.

USBImager is totally free and the source code is available under MIT license. It works under GNU/Linux, MacOS X and Windows platforms.

Install USBImager in Linux

Download the latest USBImager version from here. It os available in zip and .deb format.

If you are on a Debian-based systems, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, download the .deb file and install it like below:

$ sudo apt install usbimager_1.0.4-amd64.deb

If you are using other Linux distributions, download the zip file, extract it and move it to your $PATH .

$ wget https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager/raw/binaries/usbimager_1.0.5-x86_64-linux-x11.zip

$ unzip usbimager_1.0.5-x86_64-linux-x11.zip

The above command will extract the contents of this zip file in a directory called bin in the current working directory. Move the usbimager binary to your $PATH , for example /usr/local/bin .

$ sudo mv bin/usbimager /usr/local/bin/

For Arch Linux and its variants like Manjaro Linux, USBImager is available in AUR. Install it using any AUR helper programs like Yay as shown below.

USBImager Interface

Launch USBImager from command line by invoking the following command:

Or, it can be launched from the menu/application launcher.

The default interface of USBImage will look like below.

As you can see, USBImager’s interface is very simple. It has four rows and each row has buttons and each button does a distinctive operation.

In the first row, you can choose the image file by clicking on the three dots (. ) button.

The second row has two buttons namely Write and Read. If you want to write an image to the USB disk, click the «Write» button. To read the disk image or create a backup of the disk, choose «Read».

The third row allows you to choose the USB device.

The fourth and final row has two check box buttons namely Verify and Compress, and a drop down box to select the buffer size to use. By default, the «Verify button is selected. So, each block is read back from the disk and compared to the original image. The default buffer size is 1M. So the image file will be processed in 1M chunks. If the Compress button is checked, the image will be compressed using bzip2 format.

Create bootable USB drive with USBImager in Linux

Plugn in the USB stick and click the the three dots in the first row and choose the ISO file you want to write into the USB device. Then, select the USB device from the device selection drop down box on the third row. If you want to verify the disk with the original image, make sure the «Verify» checkbox is checked in the fourth row. Also you can choose the buffer size to use from the buffer selection drop down box. The image file will be processed in this big chunks. If you don’t know what size to use, just leave the default value which is 1M.

Finally, click «Write» button to start writing the image file to your USB disk.

It will take a few minutes depending upon the size of the ISO file. Please note that the time shown in the progress bar is just an estimate. It took me around 4 minutes to write the Fedora 32 ISO (2.7 GB) in a 16 GB USB disk.

After the process is completed, you can use the USB stick to boot any system and install the OS.

Create backup image file from the USB device

As stated already, USBImager can also backup the entire USB. Plug in the USB device, choose it from the device selection row and click the «Write» button to create a backup image file from the USB device. If you want to compress the image file, check the «Compress» box.

The generated image file is saved in the ~/Desktop location with name «usbimager-(date)T(time).dd», generated with the current timestamp. If «Compress» option is checked, then the image will be compressed using bzip2 format and a «.bz2» suffix will be added in the file name.

It took me around 8 minutes to create a backup image file without compression and nearly 1 hour and 15 minutes to create a compressed backup. As I already said, the remaining time shown in the progress bar is just an estimate. Sometimes it may take longer or shorter than the estimated time to complete depending on the size of the image file and transfer speed of the USB stick.

Conclusion

USBImager is best alternative to electron-based bootable USB creation tools, for example balenaEtcher. It is cross-platform, easy to use, and light-weight application with a minimal GUI. As far as I tested, It works just fine in my Ubuntu 20.04 LTS desktop. Hope it helps.

Related read:

• How To Create Multiboot USB Drives With Ventoy In Linux
• Create Persistent Bootable USB Using Ventoy In Linux
• Etcher – A Beautiful App To Create Bootable USB Drives And SD Cards
• Popsicle – Create Multiple Bootable USB Drives At Once
• How To Create Persistent Live USB On Ubuntu
• Bootiso Lets You Safely Create Bootable USB Drive
• MultiCD – Create Multiboot CD, DVD, and USB Images
• How To Create Bootable USB Drive Using dd Command
• How To Write An ISO To The USB Drive Directly From The Internet
• How To Create An ISO From A Bootable USB Drive In Linux
• How To Create Custom Ubuntu Live CD Image

sk

Senthilkumar Palani (aka SK) is the Founder and Editor in chief of OSTechNix. He is a Linux/Unix enthusiast and FOSS supporter. He lives in Tamilnadu, India.

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3 Best GUI-Enabled USB Image Writer Tools on Linux

USB writer tools are essential softwares that enable you to write Linux images onto USB drives, so you may run a live system or install an operating system onto a PC or multiple systems.

These tools are usually minimalistic and there are more than a few of them out there; however, I’ve chosen those which I feel are the best in both user experience and functionality for this list.

Gnome Multi-Writer

This USB tool from the GNOME project is quite the multitasker as it can write a single image (ISO or IMG) to multiple drives subsequently.

The little program functions best with desktop environments using GNOME as its base and these include Unity, Cinnamon, and Mate – just to name a few.

The supported USB sizes range from 1GB to 32GB and you can always find the program the in the standard Ubuntu repository should you develop a liking for it.

For other systems, you can find instructions on compiling gnome-multi-writer here.

Etcher – USB and SD Card Writer

This is a relatively new cross-platform and open source image burning tool by Resin that was developed using JS, HTML, node.js and GitHub’s Electron framework. It supports writing both IMG and ISO images to SD and USB cards.

The application is still in beta and has quite some issues that need be ironed out. It is, however, stable for the most part and has a few interesting features that include burning validation, a beautiful GUI, and hard drive friendly.

You can head on to Etcher’s website to make a download, for Linux or other platforms. You can run the application from the terminal in Linux by going to the directory at which you downloaded it and executing the command below from the terminal.

$ sudo ./Etcher-linux-x64.AppImage

Unetbootin – Create Bootable Live USB Image

Unetbootin has been around longer than GNOME Multiwriter and Etcher; it’s a widely used and acclaimed bootable live USB creator on Linux that is also cross platform with support for a wide variety of ISO images including Windows.

The application is opensource and also has the ability to download images directly from their source to write directly on your USB drive.

Unetbootin is available from the standard Ubuntu repo; therefore, you need not add any extra ppa. For other systems, however, you’ll have to find instructions on their website for compiling.

Conclusion

I haven’t had the chance to try a whole lot of USB tools in the past. However, I’d love to hear your thoughts on those I’ve selected on this list or any other you may have in mind in the comments below.

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Best GUI Based USB Image Writer Tools On Linux [2023]

We rarely use a CD or DVD to boot our system these days. It sounds funny but we are more into the USB era and mostly if you are using Linux then forget about the compact disk. In this tutorial, we are listing out some of the best GUI-based USB image-writing tools for Linux-based operating systems.

Best GUI-Based USB Image Writer Tools On Linux In 2023

1. Etcher – USB and SD Card Writer

Etcher is an open-source and cross-platform image writing tool. It was developed using technologies like JS, HTML, node.js, and GitHub’s Electron framework. Download the Etcher from the link below.

2. Unetbootin

A quite famous name for Linux users. Unetbootin. It is a cross-platform and open-source tool. It let you c reate a bootable Live USB disk for most of the Linux operating system.

Install Unetbootin In Ubuntu:

Run the following command to install Unetbootin in Ubuntu. At first, you need to add Official PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gezakovacs/ppa

Now, run the following command to install Unetbootin in Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install unetbootin

For other Linux, please download it from the link below:

3. Gnome Multi-Writer

Gnome Multi-Write is a tool developed by the official Gnome project team. One of the amazing features of this tool is that it can be used to write an ISO file to multiple USB devices at once.

You can download the Gnome Multi-Write from the source below.

This much for now. We will regularly update our blog. Please don’t forget to share this blog if you think it is useful for others. Meanwhile, Let us know if there are any issues in this blog post so that we can improve it.

Summary: Collection Of Best GUI Based USB Image Writer Tools On Linux Operating Systems.

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