How in the Tech

Creating a bootable USB thumb drive image of Ubuntu

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 17, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Ubuntu

The popular Linux distribution Ubuntu distributes it’s offering as a Live CD .iso file. A Live CD is effectively a living, breathing copy of the operating system that can be written to CD and then booted from. The idea has a couple of benefits. It allows the user to sample operating system without any danger of damaging their existing setup, whether by partitioning of the hard drive for an install or another manner. If you’ve ever been curious to see what the attraction is about, the Ubuntu Live CD is an excellent manner to experience it by. Another benefit to the Live CD concept is it’s excellent ability to diagnose or salvage an otherwise busted Windows install. If Windows won’t boot and you feel you are looking at a complete reinstall – how do you recover those important files? Well, ideally from your backups you’ve been maintaining but another method is leveraging the Ubuntu Live CD to access the Windows partition. Even if you have no intention of ever actively using Linux, a Live CD can be a true life-saver in situations similar to the previous.

What do you do if you don’t have a CD/DVD burner? You may be a bit taken back by that question – doesn’t everyone have that? Perhaps now, but few would argue that the entire medium is on an upward trend – or even flat-lined. Digital distribution is the future and you need to look no further than the actual Live CD system we’ve been talking about. Nevertheless, even if you have a CD/DVD burner you may not have any available media to write to. In this instance it’s actually possible to create a bootable image onto a USB flash drive – which you probably have oodles of.

UNetbootin is a free portable software utility that can take a CD iso image file and transpose it onto a USB thumb drive with just a few clicks. The process can even be simplified further in that UNetbootin can download the image directly, rather than you handling that side of the equation ahead of time.

To get started, select the desired distribution and subsequent version from the drop-downs. Then point UNetbootin to the drive letter of your USB thumb drive. The Ubuntu Live USB requires approximately 700MB on a FAT32 formatted drive. The process is non-destructive to the existing files on the drive, but I would still play it safe and ensure there is nothing valuable on the thumb drive that isn’t already somewhere else.

Once completed, to actually boot from your newly created thumb drive will likely require accessing an alternative boot menu when you power on your computer.  Generally the process involves hitting the Escape or F10 key on the initial BIOS screen as your computer powers on. The command will bring up a second screen, before Windows begins to boot, where you can select what device you wish to boot from. The options are typically: your first hard drive (likely Windows), CD/DVD drive, USB, or even the network.

Most computers purchased in the last 5 years or so provide the ability to boot from USB so you now should be all set!

Download UNetbootin