Creating a Bootable USB - Installing Linux from USB

Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 11:38 am

This applies to any version of Linux really not just Mint / Ubuntu and the method I'm going to use here assumes you already have a working Linux OS and simply want to create a bootable USB with your shiny new OS so you can try it out, install it at your leisure or use it to access a broken Windows PC.
There are a lot of tutorials on the interweb for this but I'm going to keep it REALLY simple (so no screenshots - sorry).

First things first; both Ubnutu and Mint have built in software for creating bootable USB's. I'm not going to use those, simply because you might be in a situation where an upgrade has gone wrong and the requisite software might be broken.

We are going to use a tried and tested piece of software for this called Unetbootin, so lets open a terminal and grab a copy...

Code:

wget unetbootin.sourceforge.net/unetbootin-linux-latest

Just to be sure we can execute it (saves finding the file (it's in the "home" directory) and right-clicking it, changing permissions to 'allow to be run as an executable file' we are going to do it in the terminal since we are already using in

Code:

chmod +x ./unetbootin-linux-*

We need something to unpack it, so to be sure we can, we'll install 7zip

Code:

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

Now to fire it up

Code:

sudo ./unetbootin-linux-*

If it falls over at this point, don't worry, just look for the file in your /home/ directory, manually change the file permissions so it is executable and the double click it to fire it up.

Once the software starts you'll see the options available to you. It has some pre-installed paths to popular packages but at the time of writing, it doesn't have Mint 13. If you find it doesn;t have the ISO you need, download it and point Unetbootin to it. If you were ahead of me and had already downloaded an ISO, Unetbootin should find it automagically when it starts up.

I used a USB that already had some data on it so I used Unetbootin to format the USB first before telling it to create the bootable USB. On a side note; Unetbootin will format a USB using FAT32 file system so that your USB will be bootable on both *nix and Windows machines.

It only takes a few seconds to create the bootable USB but to boot into it, you'll need to restart your PC (with the USB pluggin in of course) and enter the BIOS at start up to select the USB. On some machines that will mean either hitting DEL to get into the BIOS or an more modern machines F12 for the Boot Menu.
Once you are booted into the USB it perfoms just like a Live CD or Live DVD; you can surf the interweb take the OS for a spin etc without harming your PC in any way.
Install the OS when your ready - the button is there on your virtual desktop.

Personally I love Mint 13 with Cinnamon, I think the desktop environment us much more polished that the standrd MATE offering but if you go with MATE, you can always install Cinnamon later with

Code:

sudo apt-get install mint-meta-cinnamon-dvd