How to Create a Live USB Drive of any Linux OS With Persistent Storage (your pendrive pc😝)
What Is Live Booting
The concept of live booting is actually quite simple. With a live Linux distribution (not all distributions come in “live” flavors), you can boot your machine from either a CD/DVD disk or from a USB drive and choose to try out the operating system without making any changes to your hard drive or orignal operating system.
How this works is by running the entire system from volatile memory (RAM). The operating system and all programs are usable but run from memory. Because of this, you can boot the live system, test/use it for as long as you need, and then reboot the system (remembering to remove the live media) to return to your original system.
What Do You Do With That Downloaded File?
This is the difficult problem of the issue. For live booting,
you will have downloaded an ISO image (the file will end in the .iso file extension). What you have to do next is burn that file to a disk. If you’re burning the disk from within Windows, all you need to do is locate the downloaded file and double-click it to begin the burning process. However, as I mentioned earlier, many newer PCs do not ship with optical drives. If that is the case, what do you do?
You turn to the tried and true USB flash drive.
Once upon a time, you would have had to manage the creation of a bootable USB flash drive with the Linux command line. Now, however, there are plenty of tools available for just that purpose. One such tool is called UNetbootin. This easy to use the app can create a bootable USB flash drive from a downloaded ISO file or can even download the necessary ISO file for you. UNetbootin is available for Windows, Mac, or Linux and can, within a few short minutes, have you booting a live Linux distribution.
Creating a Bootable Live Distribution on a USB Flash Drive
Let’s walk through the process of creating a live USB flash drive with UNetbootin. Download and install the application on your platform of choice (Windows, Linux, Mac) and grab a USB flash drive large enough to hold your distribution (4GB USB flash drive should accommodate most distributions).
With everything ready, here are the steps to creating a bootable USB flash drive with UNetbootin (from a downloaded ISO file from your distribution of choice):
Insert your USB flash drive
Launch the software (you’ll need administrator privileges)
Check the box for Diskimage (see Figure 1 above)
Click the browse button (indicated with three dots)
Locate the downloaded ISO images
Select USB Drive from the Type drop-down
Select the location of your USB drive from the Drive drop-down
Click OK
Allow the creation of the live USB drive to complete
Click Exit (not Reboot), when the process completed.
Booting the USB Drive
With the live USB drive complete, you now need to insert the drive into the target computer (the computer to be used to run the live image) and boot up. If your machine doesn’t automatically boot from the USB drive, you may have to go into your machine’s BIOS and set the boot order such that external devices boot first (how this is done will vary, machine to machine).
I recently have live booted Kali Linux in my 16GB Kingston USB drive. Actually, you can easily plugin your USB into any pc and start using your portable operating system. 😉
Post a Comment