Return to the main FromUSBStick page


Creating a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from Windows

There are various methods available for Windows to create a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive.

NEVER try to use one of your hard disk drives or partitions in this process unless you really know what you are doing, as data will get erased.

Rufus

Rufus is the tool in Windows that is recommended officially by Ubuntu. A tutorial is available from here.

Click on the circle with a tick mark in order to calculate checksums for the iso file.

rufus-md5sum.png

For more details about Rufus, please browse to the Rufus web site.

Note

In most cases it is enough to make a live (live-only) system, and there is also an option for persistence. Rufus is easy to use and very reliable with and without persistence. With the correct settings and a new version of Rufus, you will find the slider and you 'drag it to the right' to get as much drive space as possible for persistence. '0 (no persistence)' is the default (which means live-only).

balenaEtcher

Download and use balenaEtcher, an easy to use and reliable cloning tool.

Pendrivelinux's Universal USB Installer

For more on this project, please see https://www.pendrivelinux.com.

Unetbootin

  • UNetbootin works in and with most Linux distros.
  • It is an extracting tool (not a cloning tool).
  • It can make a persistence file up to 4GB in size to save data and defaults.

If you are using UEFI, there are/were problems to use Unetbootin with some Debian versions due to a bug.

Download and use Unetbootin for Windows.

Run the file, select an ISO file or a distribution to download, select a target drive (USB drive or Hard Disk), select persistence if you wish, then reboot once done. If your USB drive doesn't show up, reformat it as FAT32.

Win32 Disk Imager

You can copy/flash/clone the ISO file (like it is done in Ubuntu with the 'Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator' and 'mkusb') using Win32DiskImager.

Win32DiskImager is particularly good for pre-release testing and new releases, when the standard tools might not be ready (if the configuration of the booting has been changed since the previous release).

This method is described with screenshots in the following link

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Win32DiskImager/iso2usb


Return to the main FromUSBStick page

Installation/FromUSBStick/fromWindows (last edited 2021-07-24 23:50:47 by nio-wiklund)