Bootable USB Help and Tools

Linux Bootable USB Help, tools and additional information regarding the process of booting from a USB flash drive, reformatting, and other general use.

Restoring USB drive capacity

Restore USB flash drive - recover lost capacityRestoring USB drive capacity: Restore your USB drive back to its full capacity, recover lost space, or reset it to its original state. If you've used tools like dd to overwrite or partition your flash drive, you might need to revert to a single FAT, FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS partition.

Erasing a Flash Drive - Permanently Delete Files

erasing flash drivesPermanently 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.

Make a Casper Persistent File from Windows

Casper Persistent File CreatorUse 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.

Fat32 Format Large USB Drives

USB Fat32 Format UtilityHow 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.

Mount exFAT USB from Linux

mount exFatMount exFAT USB from Linux. How to access and use an exFAT formatted USB Flash Drive from within Linux.

Testing for USB Boot compatibility

Memtest86+ USB InstallerTesting 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.

Create MBR on a USB Flash Drive

fix mbr create mbrDo 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.

Booting Linux from USB-ZIP on older systems

usb zip driveBooting 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.