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Making a bootable Linux flash drive. Bootable flash drive and UNetbootin program

UNetbootin is a small application that allows you to create bootable disks on USB drives or other optical media of different versions of the Linux operating system.

Just a couple of years ago, laser discs were mainly used for installing operating systems. However, such carriers have some disadvantages. Laser discs are very susceptible to mechanical damage, which leads to the inability to read some files and incorrect installation of the operating system. In addition, the speed of reading small files from disks was quite slow.

Today the situation has changed significantly. This was due to the rapid growth in the capacity of flash drives. You must have a USB drive of at least 1 GB to install the operating system on your computer. To turn a flash drive into an installation disk, you need to use the UNetbootin application. You can download the program completely free of charge.

How the program works

Initially, you need to download and install the UNetbootin application, after which you can begin to familiarize yourself with the program. The purpose of the utility is to create installation disks on portable drives and hard drive partitions. To do this, select the ISO image, specify the disk on which the operating system will be installed and click OK to start the process.

If there is no image on the PC, you can choose any version of Linux or BSD on the site that the program offers. You can work with the application on almost all Windows operating systems.

Application Features

The program allows you to use various ISO images of Linux and BSD OS. In addition, the application displays resources from which you can download the necessary files. In addition, the UNetbootin utility provides a choice of disk or portable drive for installing the operating system. It is also possible to choose the amount of disk space to save space after a reboot.

Advantages and disadvantages of the application

The UNetbootin application allows you to create bootable disks from flash drives for installing Linux and BSD OS. In addition, the program is able to install various versions of operating systems.

The utility has Russian localization. Thanks to the simple interface, working in the application is quite simple. In addition, the program can be downloaded absolutely free of charge, which will allow everyone to install it on their computer.

Of the negative points, one can single out the inability to create installation USB drives for the Windows operating system.

In general, UNetbootin is a good application that allows you to create installation discs from any portable drive or hard drive partition. The utility is perfect for users of Linux and BSD operating systems. The source can be an ISO image that exists on the computer. In addition, download the OS distribution kit from the network.

You can install the application on any version of the Windows operating system. If you need to install Linux or BSD OS on your computer, you should use this application. However, it is worth noting that the program does not allow you to create bootable disks for Windows operating systems.

You need to download the application from the developer's official resource or a reliable site in order to be able to create bootable disks from flash drives for Linux and BSD operating systems. At the same time, it is recommended to run a computer security system that will prevent all attempts of viruses and malicious elements to penetrate the operating system.

Today I want to tell you about how you can easily create a Live USB using the UNetbootin program.

For those who don’t quite understand why this is necessary, I’ll say that Live USB is a drive that connects to a computer via USB (in our case, it’s a USB flash drive) on which an operating system is installed that runs from this media and does not require installation on a hard drive . Such flash drives can be used to familiarize yourself with the new operating system and its further installation. They can also be used to restore data or computer health. In addition, many people use Live USB as a portable operating system, which in some cases can really help out.

Due to some features of installing the OS on a USB drive, it is easier to use special programs for these purposes, one of them is UNetbootin.

Installing UNetbootin

So, as always, you need to install the program first. Ubuntu users can do this directly from the default repository with the command:

sudo apt-get install unetbootin

For those who do not have such an opportunity, go to the program website and select the desired platform right on the main one. UNetbootin is available for Windows Linux and Mac. Downloading. After downloading, launch the application.

UNetbootin requires an administrator password, enter it and now you can start creating a Live USB.

Creating a LiveUSB with UNetbootin

There is nothing complicated here. First of all, you need to select the distribution image.

The program itself can download the system image from the Internet. To do this, select the “Distribution kit” item at the top of the screen, then select the required distribution kit and its version.

You can also create a Live USB from a pre-downloaded image. To do this, check the item "Disk Image", then select the type of image, there is an option "Diskette" (you never know) and "ISO". After that, you need to tell the program the path to our file.

Next, select the media type. UNetbootin can install the system both on a flash drive and on a hard drive. We choose a flash drive. After that, select the media itself, I have a flash drive / dev / sdb1. And now you can click "OK" - the creation of Live USB will begin.

Upon completion, UNetbootin will prompt you to restart the computer so that we can boot into the newly created Live USB, or simply exit the application. Everything is here for you to choose from.

Bootable flash drives are always useful. The computer is broken, the OS is running slowly, you need to install Linux ... There are thousands of such situations, but there is only one solution. In this article, we will look at how to make a bootable Linux USB flash drive.

Rufus is the most common and secure recording option. The second one is UltraISO - in case of any problems, you should use it. Well, if he didn’t help, then UNetBootIn will come to the rescue.

Rufus is a program for Windows that allows you to create a boot disk, including Linux. To create a bootable flash drive, first download Rufus. Now you need to download the desired Linux distribution in the form of an ISO image. After the download is complete, run the program.

We leave all the parameters by default, just select the disk we need and instead of FreeDOS select the ISO image and specify the path to it with the button to the right of the list. For example, an Ubuntu 16.04 installation would look like this:

We press "Start". Everything! You now have your own bootable flash drive. See below for how to run it.

Making a bootable USB flash drive using UNetBootIn

UNetBootIn is a cross-platform application for creating boot disks for Linux distributions. You can download it.

There are two ways to create a bootable flash drive. The first is to select a distribution from the list above:

The second way is to download the image and select it in the field below:

After selection, click "OK". The bootable flash drive will be installed.

Important! It is better to download the ISO-image of the system yourself, otherwise the program does not guarantee its novelty and relevance!

Create a bootable USB flash drive using UltraISO

UltraISO is a paid program for working with ISO images. To create a bootable USB flash drive, you can use the trial version of the program.

Download the program from the official site. After installation, we will choose to use the trial 30-day period.

Now open the previously downloaded ISO image:

To create a bootable USB flash drive, you need to find the "Boot" menu and select the "Burn hard disk image" item in it:

Here we select the desired disk, and also select the USB-HDD + v2 recording method - it guarantees the operation of the flash drive in almost any BIOS:

We press "Record". A warning will appear about formatting the flash drive. Click "OK".

Everything, the process has begun. We are waiting for the end of the recording.

How to boot from a flash drive through BIOS

To start the BIOS, use one of the following keys (listed in order of decreasing probability of operation).

DELETE

Important! If you have a Lenovo laptop, try Fn + F12!

Modern users of personal computers and laptops are less and less using external drives such as CDs and DVDs. It is probably not worth talking about their irrelevance, since they have long been replaced by flash drives, which, with their small size, can store several tens of gigabytes of information.

So, in order to write any operating system to your PC, it is enough to have a small flash drive with a virtual image of this very OS on it. To write these images, special utilities are used, one of which is the UNetBootin program.

A little about UNetBootin
UNetBootin is a cross-platform program that runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X systems. Using this application, the user can write a virtual Linux OS image to any external drive in order to use it later to install and further use this OS.

The main requirement for correctly burning an ISO image using this utility is that the free space of the drive must exceed the size of the ported image.

Creating an image
To get started, you will need an external drive, downloaded UNetBootin program and the distribution of the operating system, downloaded from the official site of the developers or from some other site you have checked if you want some special build.

In order to make a virtual image of the Linux operating system, you need to do the following:

Open the UNetBootin program.
Put a checkmark next to the item Image.
Click on the " … ” next to the line next to it and select the downloaded Linux distribution.
At the very bottom of the program window in paragraph Type put value USB disk, and in paragraph Disk– path to the flash drive to which the image will be written.
Click OK.

After the actions taken, the UNetBootin utility will automatically start recording the image. You can watch the whole process through the program window.

In this article, I will walk you through the process of creating a bootable USB flash drive (LiveUSB) on Linux, Windows, and MacOS operating systems. I will burn the ISO image of the Linux distribution to a USB flash drive, but you can use the programs described below to burn any Live images.

As a rule, the user is faced with the task of writing an ISO image to a USB flash drive in order to get a LiveUSB as a result. For example, you decide to install Ubuntu. To do this, you download an ISO image with the system, burn it to a USB flash drive, boot from the USB flash drive, and the Live system or installer starts.

To boot from a LiveUSB flash drive, you must set your computer's BIOS to boot from USB in the first place. For many motherboards, when you turn on the computer, you can call up a menu in which you can choose which device to boot from. In this case, you do not need to change the BIOS settings. For example, I have this menu called by pressing the key F12.

Create a bootable flash drive (in Linux, Windows and MacOS)

To create a bootable flash drive, I will use a free program Etcher. This is a very simple and understandable program. Creating bootable media is done in it is extremely simple.

The program is cross-platform and with its help you can create bootable USB flash drives in Linux, Windows and MacOS. It works the same on all systems.

The program can be downloaded from the official website https://etcher.io
Note: On Linux, installation is not required, just download the file etcher-1.2.3-x86-64.AppImage and run it.

Consider the process of creating a bootable USB flash drive in the Etcher program.

Video - How to create a bootable USB flash drive in Etcher

Creating a bootable USB flash drive with UNetbootin

There is a fairly popular program for Linux UNetbootin, which allows you to create bootable flash drives. It can burn disk images, as well as automatically download images of popular Linux distributions (although very old versions of distributions are available for download, so this feature is unlikely to be useful to you).

The program is cross-platform and can be used on both Windows and MacOS. I have only tested it under Linux. But she has one big drawback! Some flash drives created by her simply refuse to boot. For example, nothing worked for me until I formatted the flash drive in FAT16. I formatted the flash drive in the GParted program, the size of the partition on the flash drive was automatically set to 4GB, the rest of the free space was simply not used.

The following describes the process of creating a bootable USB flash drive in UNetbootin.

Possible problems

Missing operating system error

If you receive the message " Missing Operating System”, then most likely the flash drive does not have the flag Boot. To install it, restart your computer and log in to your system. After that, run the command in the terminal (the flash drive must be connected):

Parted /dev/sdb set 1 boot on

Now restart your computer again.

No default or UI configuration directive found error

I encountered another error while booting the computer - "No default or UI configuration directive found". This problem was solved only by formatting the flash drive in FAT16 and re-creating LiveUSB.