To be clear, this bootable USB drive will boot into a working copy of Ubuntu Linux but it will not save any changes you make.
You will require an Ubuntu installation ISO image to create the bootable USB drive, so make sure you have downloaded the version of Ubuntu you wish to use.
#Ubuntu rufus iso or dd install#
When you are ready to install Ubuntu, you can use the USB drive as the installation medium. It allows you to try out the popular Unix-like operating system without making changes to the computer. A bootable USB drive provides the same experience to the user as an Ubuntu Live DVD. Whichever method you choose, you’ll need the Linux distribution’s ISO file.įor example, Ubuntu Linux has two built-in methods for creating a bootable USB drive. You can also use the dd command to do this from a terminal on any Linux distro. There are two ways to do this: Some Linux distributions include a graphical USB startup disk creator tool that will do it for you. While you don’t technically “burn” the ISO file to a USB drive, there’s a special process required to take a Linux ISO file and make a bootable USB drive with it. You can’t simply copy or extract the ISO file to the USB drive and expect it to work, however.
#Ubuntu rufus iso or dd Pc#
You can also install a Linux distribution on your PC from it-no CD or DVD drive required.
#Ubuntu rufus iso or dd windows#
Extract from an iso file and create a persistent live USB drive or a Windows install drive.Clone from an iso file or a compressed image file to a live-only USB drive.You can use several tools to do it, for example mkusb, which can It is possible to restore a cloned USB boot drive with Ubuntu to a standard storage drive unless the drive hardware is damaged (for example by excessive wear).
The Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator in Ubuntu versions before 16.04 LTS.An extracting tool will get problems with new versions of a linux distro, if the boot structure changes from the previous version, until the tool is modified to take that into account. This requires that the tools recognize the boot structure of the iso file, and when it changes, such tools will fail. Other tools do not clone but extract the content from the iso file and modify it (copy to a read-write file system and fix the bootloader). mkusb (when cloning which is the standard mode for linux iso files).The Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator in Ubuntu version 16.04 LTS and newer versions.Therefore I would recommend other cloning tools, that are safer, because they help you identify the correct target drive and let you double-check, that you clone to and overwrite the correct drive. There is no final checkpoint, where you can make sure that everything is correct, and a small typing error is enough to clone to and overwrite the wrong drive. The result depends more on the content of the file than on dd itself.ĭd is a powerful but dangerous tool, because it does what you tell it to do without questions, even if you tell it to wipe the family pictures.
So you can boot from the drive, but you cannot write to it (not use it for storage).ĭd can clone any file to a USB drive or memory card, for example an image file of an installed system, for example for Raspberry Pi. This structure has a special boot sector and the ISO9660 file system, which is read-only. Standard Ubuntu iso files are approximately 1.5 GiB and they are 'hybrid' iso files, which means that the same structure will boot from a DVD drive and a USB drive (or a memory card). Dd always makes a 1:1 copy, writing exactly what it reads.