Many operating systems are installed via iso
images deployed to removable media. While there are many tools available to accomplish writing/formatting iso
images to bootable media, I prefer to use the command line.
Find the removable media path
If the system has already mounted the device it’s address can be found using fdisk
. I was able to find the address of my new removable media device by it’s size:
$ sudo fdisk -l Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdc1 128 122879999 122879872 58.6G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT |
The address of my removable media device is /dev/sdc1
. Using this address you can write an iso
image with dd
(included with gnu linux). This examples uses an iso
image that’s named bootable.iso
(executed from the same directory):
# dd - Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands. # if - read from FILE instead of stdin # of - write to FILE instead of stdout # bs - read and write up to BYTES bytes at a time $ sudo dd if=bootable.iso of=/dev/sdc1 bs=4k |
When the operation completes the removable media should be bootable. Leave a comment if you know how to make the process more verbose.