How to Make Linux ISOs Bootable From USB Flash Drive | The Command-Line Way
dd Command Makes It Both Easy and Dangerous to Write a CD/DVD/BD Image to a USB Flash Drive
Almost every Linux distribution comes with a Live installer which enables you to try it by booting into a live system from a CD, DVD or USB key without installing any files to the computer. When it comes to making Linux distributions’ ISO image bootable, not many GUI options are available. If you use Linux Mint or its’ derivatives, you can find mintstick to be a great tool. Or, for any other Linux distributions, GNOME MultiWriter can come in handy. But I prefer the little ol’ dd command.
dd command is a command-line utility for copying purpose. We can use it to make bootable USB flash drive from any Linux distributions’ ISO image file.
You can use any CD/DVD/BD image file for this purpose. It just has to be an ISO image. That’s all. And the size of that image file has to be less that that of your USB flash drive.
To make a bootable USB flash drive, first you have to have an ISO image file (duh!). You can download the ISO image file from your preferred Linux distributions’ official site.
To keep this post simple, I’ll assume you have an ISO image file of any Linux…
