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Comment by Lagged2Death | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Linux noob, I've played around with some live CDs. The other day I tried to set up a flash drive to work the same way as a live CD. I did get it working eventually, but it was a surprisingly bad experience. Some of the flash drives I created didn't work at all, one of them booted a couple times, then stopped working, the boot process would vary from one boot to the next, etc. In my experience, live CDs "just work" in comparison.

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It's really super easy. If you're creating the bootable USB stick on a Windows machine, use RUFUS ( https://rufus.akeo.ie/ ). It's about as straight-forward and noob-friendly as it gets. A single window, options in plain English. If you're creating the bootable USB stick from a Linux machine, use Etcher ( https://www.etcher.io/ ). Also very user friendly and simple. It's even distributed as a downloadable .AppImage file, so it's a double-click install on most distros. On Mac OSX - sorry, no idea, haven't used one since Apple IIe's in middle school, but I'm sure there is something similar out there for OSX (and if nothing else, you could probably get dd working in a terminal if you had to) EDIT: Forgot to mention that RUFUS on Windows will automatically detect which versions of syslinux (the low-level booty-BIOS-y stuff) the .ISO that you select uses, and sets itself up accordingly. It can even use a newer version of syslinux if the one supplied in the .ISO is outdated. Really solid software.

RUFUS is fast but Yumi is best if you want a swiss-army-knife style bootable USB stick with multiple images to choose from, including Windows install DVD images. It also supports setup on an existing USB stick you don't want to completely wipe.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

http://AlternativeTo.net pulled up UNetBootin as a cross-platform alternative.

http://unetbootin.github.io/

UNetBootin seemed to break a lot of images back a few years ago when I used it. Rufus actually scans the image and makes sure it's using the correct bootloader / filesystem type.

On macOS (and Linux etc) you can write images to USB drives using dd, cp, or even cat.

If you prefer a GUI, Etcher is cross-platform.

Thanks for the tip, but Rufus was one of three programs I tried, and it created a couple of duds (and a working stick) for me.

I suspect that the paradigm of bootable flash drives simply leaves more variables uncontrolled than write-once disks do.

my goto method is to use dd to format the USB with an ISO. it is a one step process. do not set 'of' to one of your hard drives.

# if=input_file, of=output_file, bs=block_size

dd bs=4M if=/path/to/fedora.iso of=/dev/sdx status=progress && sync

I've used dd forever, but nowadays these also work equally well (same speed and reliability):

    cp fedora.iso /dev/sdx
    cat fedora.iso > /dev/sdx

I wish I knew what changed. Smarter block sizes? Something about the raw device or ioctl?

They're both faster because they don't read and write block by block. Why people keep recommending dd for stuff like this, I don't have a clue.

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