Probably most of you might have thought about the problem of preparing a bootloader. flash drives with operating system Linux on board and produce in further installation Ubuntu systems from a flash drive. In this article we will be able to look in detail at how to implement this in an already installed Linux. Read about how to create a bootable USB flash drive in Windows here:. Well, let's go :)

All we may need is an empty flash drive with a volume of information entered of at least 2 Gigabytes, an image ISO some kind of disk with a Linux system, an Internet connection and some free time.

Well, of course, the first thing we do is (in no case insert a flash drive) we install a special software, namely a software application with a somewhat unusual name UNetBootin. This is an excellent software application designed to create bootable flash drives from ISO image ov. There is nothing superfluous in it, it is easy to manage and it is also available in the repository storage Ubuntu.
Let's install it now:
sudoapt–getinstall unet-bootin

And after waiting for a few minutes, you can already launch this program:

In that software application there is also the possibility create bootable flash drives, even if you do not have an ISO image with the Linux operating system at hand. It will simply be copied from the Internet and then copied to a flash drive. In order to do this in the above software application, it will be necessary to select the top “distribution” checkbox, then select the required Linux distribution and select the version of this distribution. True, we already have our own ISO image. For this reason, we select the second “image” checkbox, select our image format - ISO from the list of formats (in case it suddenly isn’t the default), then press the “...” button and look for it on the hard drive our personal computer.

It is also possible to create an image manually (by specifying your initrd, kernel and usage additional options), but all this goes very far beyond the scope of our article today, and we don’t need it.

That’s it, we have already selected the image, then we must make our choice on the “Type” item – USB drive to indicate our flash drive on which we will record our image “Disk: /nodiv/sdb2” and click on Ok button. That's it, the process has begun! If you have made your choice on the top checkbox, the process of recording the image may take much longer, since the image must first be downloaded to HDD, and then it will be recorded. This concludes our article. Good luck.

In this article we will look at the process of creating a bootable Linux USB flash drive using the free UNetbootin program. It is worth noting that using such media you can not only install Linux, but also run this operating system without installation on any computer or laptop.

So, for example, if your computer is running Windows control does not load, works very slowly, or there are other problems with it, and you urgently need to access files on your hard drive or access the Internet, then such a flash drive will be very useful - the operating system is already ready to work without installation.

How to Create a Bootable Linux USB Flash Drive Using UNetbootin

For example, let's create a bootable USB flash drive with the OS Linux Mint(a popular Linux distribution based on Ubuntu). For other distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS and others), the process of writing bootable media is no different.

• Download the ISO image of Linux Mint from the official website;
• Connect the USB flash drive to the computer (with a capacity of at least 2 GB), first make sure that there is no important data on it, and format it in FAT32;
  
  
• and run the UNetbootin program (does not require installation);
• In the program window, check “Disk image” → click the button with three dots (in the screenshot) → specify the path to the Linux Mint ISO image in Explorer;
  
  
  
• Next, go to “Media” → select the flash drive prepared for recording → click “OK”;
  
  

That's all. Now we have a bootable USB flash drive with Linux OS, which allows, as noted earlier, not only to install Linux on a particular computer, but also to simply run this operating system without installation on any computer or laptop.

Ubuntu already has an application for creating disk images - Startup Disk Creator, but it can only create bootable USBs with Linux. For creating a bootable USB drive with Windows from Linux, there is WinUSB, but it hasn’t been updated for quite some time, and to be honest, it didn’t work for me. This post is quite detailed, and is intended primarily for people new to Linux.

Before I continue, it should be noted that in the Windows world there are two boot methods:

• MBR, in which space is reserved at the beginning of the disk and a special boot file is located;
• EFI, in which the bootloader executable file is stored in standard arrangement on FAT32 file system;

If you don’t know which one to choose, then the most commonly used option that works without modification Windows files- this is a msdos partition table with a fat32 file system and a boot flag.

First of all, the USB drive must be prepared. In Linux, the simplest and most convenient utility for these purposes is gparted.

Install it if it is not installed:

sudo apt-get install gparted

Preparation USB disk A

Select our USB flash drive, unmount it if it is mounted:

Now you need to recreate the partition table, and select the msdos type. Go to the Device menu and select Create partition table:

After that, select the unmarked area, click right click mouse over it and select the “New” menu item. In the window that appears, select the file NTFS system or FAT32. If you have some kind of non-standard assembly that may contain files larger than 4 gigabytes, then file system must definitely be NTFS, otherwise, you can select FAT32, and then you can also boot from UEFI. You also need to specify a label for the USB disk. Important: the label should not just be “Windows”, but something more unique. If the file system is FAT32, then the label must be indicated in capital letters.

We apply all our changes:

Exit gparted.

Copying Windows files to a USB drive

Now we need to mount the Windows image and copy the data from it to our previously prepared USB drive. In most modern work environments this can be done from file manager. Right-click on the required image, select Open with and select Disk Image Mounter:

If you do not have such a utility, you can mount it from the command line:

sudo mount -o loop $HOME /Downloads/Windows.iso /mnt/cdrom

Where $HOME/Downloads/Windows.iso must be replaced with the path to the Windows image. The image will be mounted in the /mnt/cdrom directory.

Making a USB drive bootable

If we create an MBR boot disk

To create an MBR boot entry we will use grub:

sudo grub-install --target=i386-pc --boot-directory="/media/$user/$drive/boot" /dev/sdX

• $user - current user name;
• $drive - image name;
• /dev/sdX - disk location (in my case /dev/sdb ;

If the image was mounted manually, then /media/$user/$drive/boot must be replaced with /mnt/cdrom/boot .
If there were no errors, you should see something like this in the console:

Installing for i386-pc platform. Installation finished. No error reported.

Now on the USB disk in the boot/grub directory you need to create a file grub.cfg with the following contents:

default=1 timeout=15 color_normal=light-cyan/dark-gray menu_color_normal=black/light-cyan menu_color_highlight=white/black menuentry "Start Windows Installation" ( insmod ntfs insmod search_label search --no-floppy --set=root --label $USB_drive_label --hint hd0,msdos1 ntldr/bootmgr) menuentry "Boot from the first hard drive" ( insmod ntfs insmod chain insmod part_msdos insmod part_gpt set root=(hd1) chainloader +1 boot )

In the listing above, $USB_drive_label needs to be replaced with the label that we assigned to the disk in the first step. In this case, WINUSB2503.

Reboot, boot from the USB drive and select Start Windows Installation.

If we create a UEFI boot disk

With UEFI everything is somewhat simpler. Please note that this method Suitable only for Windows 7 x64 and higher.
After all the files have been copied, you need to go to the efi/boot directory. If it contains the files bootx64.efi or bootia32.efi, then everything is in order, you can try to boot from the disk.

If there are none of the above files, then you need to go to the directory where you mounted Windows image, open the install.wim file with an archiver (7z must be installed). In the archiver, open the path./1/Windows/Boot/EFI, unzip the bootmgfw.efi file into the efi/boot directory and rename it bootx64.efi. If these files are not there, then most likely you have a 32-bit Windows image. 32 bit Windows does not support booting from UEFI.

• Make a bootable Windows USB from Linux - contains some useful information;
• Grub2/Installing - Ubuntu documentation;
• Installing GRUB using grub-install - GRUB 2.0 documentation;

Almost no one uses disks to install Linux on a PC or laptop anymore. It is much easier to burn the image to a flash drive and quickly install a new OS. In this case, you don’t need to bother with a disk drive that may not exist at all, and you don’t have to worry about a scratched disk either. By following simple instructions, you can easily install Linux from a removable drive.

First of all, you will need a drive formatted in FAT32. Its volume must be at least 4 GB. Also, if you don’t yet have a Linux image, then internet with good speed will come in handy.

Our instructions will help you format the media in FAT32. It talks about formatting in NTFS, but the procedures will be the same, only you need to select the option everywhere "FAT32"

Please note that when installing Linux on a laptop or tablet, this device must be connected to power (to an outlet).

It is better to download the image from Ubuntu from the official website. You can always find it there current version OS without worrying about viruses. The ISO file weighs about 1.5 GB.

Step 2: Create a bootable USB flash drive

It is not enough to simply transfer the downloaded image to a flash drive; it must be written down correctly. For these purposes you can use one of special utilities. Let's take the Unetbootin program as an example. To complete the task, do this:

For more information on creating bootable media with Ubuntu, read our instructions.

Step 3: BIOS Setup

In order for the computer to load the USB flash drive when turned on, you will need to configure something in the BIOS. You can access it by clicking "F2", "F10", "Delete" or "Esc". Then follow a series of simple steps:

This procedure is suitable for AMI BIOS; it may differ on other versions, but the principle is the same. Read more about this procedure in our article on setting up the BIOS.

Step 4: Preparing for Installation

The next time you restart your PC, the bootable flash drive will launch and you will see a window with a choice of language and OS boot mode. Then do the following:

In this article I will look at the creation process Bootable USB flash drive(LiveUSB) in operating systems- Linux, Windows and MacOS. I will burn an ISO image of a Linux distribution onto a flash drive, but you can use the programs described below to burn any Live images.

As a rule, the user is faced with the task of writing an ISO image to a flash drive in order to obtain a LiveUSB as a result. For example, let's say you decide to install Ubuntu. To do this, you download an ISO image with the system, write it to a flash drive, boot from the flash drive, and the Live system or installer starts.

To boot from a LiveUSB flash drive, you must set boot from USB to first place in your computer's BIOS settings. For many motherboards When you turn on the computer, you can call up a menu in which you can choose which device to boot from. In this case, change BIOS settings not required. For example, for me this menu is called up by pressing a key F12.

Creating a bootable USB flash drive (on Linux, Windows and MacOS)

For creating bootable flash drive I will use free program Etcher. This is a very simple and understandable program. Creation bootable media it is done extremely simply.

The program is cross-platform and can be used to create bootable flash drives in Linux, Windows and MacOS. It works the same on all systems.

The program can be downloaded from the official website https://etcher.io
Note: IN Linux installation not required, just download the file etcher-1.2.3-x86-64.AppImage and run it.

Let's look at the process of creating a bootable USB flash drive in the Etcher program.

Video - How to create a bootable USB flash drive in Etcher

Creating a bootable USB flash drive using UNetbootin

There is a fairly popular program for Linux UNetbootin, which allows you to create bootable USB flash drives. It can burn disk images, as well as automatically download images of popular Linux distributions (although very old versions of distributions are available for download, so this function is unlikely to be useful to you).

The program is cross-platform and can be used on both Windows and MacOS. I only tested it under Linux. But she has one big drawback! Some flash drives created by her simply refuse to boot. For example, nothing worked for me until I formatted the flash drive in FAT16. I formatted the flash drive in the GParted program, the size of the partition on the flash drive was automatically set to 4GB, the rest of the free space was simply not used.

The process of creating a bootable USB flash drive in UNetbootin is described below.

Possible problems

Missing Operating System error

If you receive the message " Missing Operating System", then most likely the flash drive does not have the flag set Boot. To install it, restart your computer and log into your system. After this, run the command in the terminal (the flash drive must be connected):

Parted /dev/sdb set 1 boot on

Now restart your computer again.

Error No default or UI configuration directive found

I encountered another error while booting the computer - “No default or UI configuration directive found”. This problem was solved only by formatting the flash drive in FAT16 and re-creation LiveUSB.

Video - How to create a bootable USB flash drive in UNetbootin