Burning ISO files to a USB drive is a common task for many Linux users. It is required when you are about to install a new operating system, or when you need to run a live Linux distribution. In this blog post, we will guide you through the process of burning an ISO image to a USB flash drive on a Linux machine.
Prerequisites
Before we begin, you should have a USB drive with at least 4 GB of storage, and the ISO image file that you want to burn on the USB drive. For this tutorial, we will use the command-line utility dd which is pre-installed on almost all Linux distributions.
Step 1: Identify Your USB Drive
The first step is to identify the name of your USB drive. You can achieve this by running the following command in the terminal:
sudo fdisk -l
The output of this command will list all the disks attached to your system. Your USB drive will be listed as something like /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc., depending on the number of drives on your system.
Step 2: Unmount the USB Drive
Before burning the ISO image, we need to ensure that the USB drive is not mounted. Use the following command to unmount the drive:
sudo umount /dev/sdb
Replace /dev/sdb with the path of your USB drive.
Step 3: Burn the ISO Image to USB Drive
Now we are ready to burn the ISO image to our USB drive. Navigate to the directory where your ISO file is located and execute the following command:
sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/your.iso of=/dev/sdb status=progress oflag=sync
Replace /path/to/your.iso with the actual path to your ISO file and /dev/sdb with your USB drive path.
This process may take a while, depending on the size of the ISO file and the speed of your USB drive.
Conclusion
That’s it! You have successfully burned an ISO image to your USB drive using the dd command. You can now use this USB drive to install the operating system, or run the live Linux distribution.
We hope this guide was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.
