How to Create Bootable USB Drive Using dd Command

Making a bootable USB drive for your favorite operating system is very easy. The command line ‘dd’ tool can do that for you, writing an image ISO file to a USB drive with minimal effort.

Usually, we create bootable USB drives and install Linux and other operating systems. Of course, many GUI applications to make bootable ISO are available such as Unetbootin, balenaEtcher, etc.

Related: Ventoy: How to Create a Multiboot USB Drive with Multiple ISO Files

But there is an easy command line way, too, and no need for the above applications. We can make bootable ISO for any operating system using the dd tool in Linux. Most Linux distributions have preinstalled dd tool. 

The dd (Data Duplicator) utility is a powerful tool that makes copies using block by block from one device to another. So we can also use the dd tool for data backup and restoration from one device to another.

Create Bootable USB Drive Using dd Command

This assumes you already have an ISO file that you want to move to an external thumb drive; type USB storage volume.

First, connect the USB drive and unmount it, assuming you know its designation, with something like the following:

umount /dev/sdb*

This assumes that your USB drive is showing as /dev/sdb.

If you have multiple hard drives already connected to your machine, the drive you’d like to target might be “/dev/sdc” or “/dev/sdd” or “/dev/sde.” You get the picture.

We can have a look at the partitions and file systems on the system with this command:

sudo lsblk

After confirming which is your target drive and unmounting it, we need to format the unmounted drive. Let’s do this formatting with the following:

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb

We’re ready to copy the ISO file to the USB drive using the dd command.

I’d recommend navigating to the directory where you downloaded the ISO. Let’s say you put the ISO in your user’s “Downloads” directory for this example.

cd ~/Downloads

Since we’re already in the right directory, we can use the following:

sudo dd bs=4M if=filename.iso of=/dev/sdb status=progress

Where filename.iso is, of course, replaced by the actual name of your ISO file.

• bs sets the default block size
• if stands for “input file.” It is used to specify the location of the ISO file.
• of stands for “output file.” It specifies where to write the ISO file. In our case, it’s /dev/sdb

This may take several minutes to execute. However, you should see something like these results returned:

That’s all. You can use the same procedure to make any OS a bootable USB drive.

Conclusion

As you can see, creating a bootable Linux USB drive is a relatively straightforward task.

You can load your USB drive with your preferred Linux distribution and use it to install the operating system on your PC or laptop in minutes.