[Linux] How to create a startup disk using command line
by Riley MacDonald, February 18, 2018

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.

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