Tuesday, October 22, 2019

command line - How to create a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from terminal?



Is there any way to create a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from the terminal without using any third-party applications like YUMI, Unetbootin, Startup Disk Creator, etc.



I tried to create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive with dd method,



sudo umount /dev/sdb
sudo dd if=/path/to/ubuntu.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M



It creates files on the USB disk, but when I try to boot the USB disk it shows an Operating System Not Found error.



You can use dd.



 sudo umount /dev/sd  


where is a letter followed by a number, look it up by running lsblk.




It will look something like



sdb      8:16   1  14.9G  0 disk 
├─sdb1 8:17 1 1.6G 0 part /media/username/usb volume name
└─sdb2 8:18 1 2.4M 0 part


I would dismount sdb1.




Then, next (this is a destructive command and wipes the entire USB drive with the contents of the iso, so be careful):



 sudo dd bs=4M if=path/to/input.iso of=/dev/sd conv=fdatasync  status=progress


where input.iso is the input file, and /dev/sd is the USB device you're writing to (run lsblk to see all drives to find out what is for your USB).



This method is fast and has never failed me.







EDIT: for those on a Mac ending up here, use lowercase for bs=4m:



sudo dd if=inputfile.img of=/dev/disk bs=4m && sync





EDIT: If USB drive does not boot (this happened to me), it is because the target is a particular partition on the drive instead of the drive. So the target needs to be /dev/sdc and not dev/sdc For me it was /dev/sdb .




Reference: https://superuser.com/a/407327 and https://askubuntu.com/a/579615/669976


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