Linux Bootable USB Help, tools, tips and additional information regarding the process of booting from a USB flash drive, reformatting, and other general use.
Which fast USB flash drive is best? The best and fastest USB flash drives are generally going to be SSD or Solid State. Assuming your Computer is at least USB 3.0 capable, flash thumb drives that are Solid State (SSD) are much more pleasant to work with than NAND based drives.
How to Restore USB drives back to their full capacity, recover lost storage space and reset a USB flash drive back to its original state. This post is for those who used tools like Etcher, Win32Disk Imager or dd to copy ISO to USB, overwriting the partition on a flash drive, and now want to repair USB by reverting back to a single FAT, FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS partition.
Permanently erasing a flash drive: Have you ever wondered how to permanently delete files from a USB drive so no one can recover them? In this tutorial, we show you how to wipe USB drives using Linux, making sure that your files are gone for good.
Use the Linux persistent USB file creator to make a casper rw persistent file or writable persistence loop file for Ubuntu based distributions. Written for use from within Windows, this tool enables you to quickly create a loopback filesystem image to use for saving and restoring Ubuntu changes while booted from a live USB.
How to Fat32 Format 32GB or Larger USB Flash Drives. When working from within a Windows environment, you will find it is not possible to use the default Windows tools to format larger than 32GB USB hard drives or flash drives with Fat32. This is because those tools default to using NTFS or exFAT for bigger drives. In this case we need to format usb to fat32 using another utility or method. Linux users wont encounter this trouble, as the tools used there do not care what size the drive is. ;)
Recover Lost Space on a USB Flash Drive: Missing space on your USB drive after formatting? USB drive showing the wrong capacity? You may have noticed this issue after using tools to burn an ISO to USB.
Mount exFAT USB from Linux. How to access and use an exFAT formatted USB Flash Drive from within Linux. Most newer Linux distributions already ship with exFAT FAT64 filesystem support via the FUSE library and related utilities. However, many older Ubuntu based distributions did not. The following solution covers the simple process of enabling exFAT detection from older Ubuntu based distributions.
Convert FAT32 to NTFS Without Losing Data: A Step-by-Step Guide. Do you need to store files larger than 4GB on a FAT32-formatted drive? The FAT32 file system has a limitation that prevents you from doing so, making it necessary to convert to NTFS. Luckily, you can convert FAT32 to NTFS without losing your data or needing to reformat. In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the process step-by-step.
Testing for USB Boot compatibility using a bootable USB tester tool; This segment covers methods to help you check if a computer system BIOS can boot from a USB device. It can be used to determine if the computer can boot a Linux version from a bootable USB. In most cases if the test is successful, you should have no problem running a Live USB Linux.
Do you need to create MBR (Master Boot Records) on a USB flash drive? Some USB flash drives are notorious for having problems with corrupted Master Boot Records. If your system suddenly refuses to boot from the flash drive, the MBR may be at fault.
Booting Linux from USB-ZIP: If you have an older computer system, your BIOS might not support USB-HDD boot. In this case, it may still be possible to boot Linux from USB if your BIOS does list USB-ZIP as a boot option. In order for this to happen, we need to trick the BIOS into thinking that the USB flash drive is a zip drive.
The error message "Could not find kernel image: linux" typically occurs during the boot process of a Linux system, indicating that the bootloader (e.g., syslinux or GRUB) is unable to locate the kernel image necessary for booting the operating system. This issue can have various causes. In this post, I cover some of the basic things to look for if you are encountering this boot error.
How to easily Remove the U3 smart software from your USB flash pen drive. "The U3 Uninstaller" application. At one time a vast majority of USB flash pen drives manufactured by SanDisk were packaged with U3 software. While this software had some neat features and package includes, a seasoned computer user may not need or desire to use the U3 smart software.
