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Postrequisites - restore the USB stick
'Postrequisites' - after installation: how to restore the USB stick to a standard storage drive. The standard is an MSDOS partition table (MBR) and a partition with the FAT32 file system.
gparted
In order to re-use the stick after installing Ubuntu, just format it completely (including MBR) using gparted in Ubuntu or Disk Management in Windows. This works in most cases.
Otherwise, see details in this link: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Win32DiskImager/iso2usb/FormatHelp
gparted comes with the iso file but is available only in the live system. You install it into an installed system with
sudo apt-get install gparted
Disks alias gnome-disks
Sometimes Disks works where gparted fails, for example to unmount the drive after using the Startup Disk Creator.
mkusb - works where other tools fail to restore a USB flash drive
mkusb with a GUI and mkusb-nox in text mode have built-in features to wipe the first megabyte, create a new partition table and file system. This makes it work where other tools get confused by some data near the head end of the drive.
See the following links
If you run standard Ubuntu, you need an extra instruction to get the repository Universe. (Kubuntu, Lubuntu ... Xubuntu have the repository Universe activated automatically.)
sudo add-apt-repository universe # only for standard Ubuntu
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/ppa # and press Enter sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install mkusb
and if you want also the command line version without graphics
sudo apt-get install mkusb-nox
It is easy to restore the USB flash drive to a standard storage drive with mkusb-dus
mkusb version 12, mkusb-dus, has a dedicated menu to restore a USB stick to a standard storage device.
It is easy to restore the USB flash drive to a standard storage drive with mkusb-nox
sudo mkusb-nox restore