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How to create a bootable USB thumb drive from an ISO installer image
Purpose
For those who wish to install a bootable ISO on to a USB thumb drive for faster installation or because your computer is not equipped with an optical drive.
Solution
Using Windows
Prerequisites
- A bootable ISO image
- A USB 3.0 thumb drive large enough to accommodate the ISO or larger and can be erased
- Rufus, which facilitates the creation of bootable USB drives and can be found at:
http://rufus.akeo.ie
Note: Rufus is a user friendly utility which does not come with an installer. I recommend that once you’ve extracted it from the zip archive that you place it in a folder called Simple Applications that to be locate on your desktop for easy access.
Solution
- Go to the location where you’ve installed Rufus and double-click on it
- Plug in your USB drive to an available port and Rufus will auto detect it or select it from the Device pull-down menu
- Click on the disk image icon next to Create a bootable disk image using
- Navigate to the folder where your ISO image is located, click to select it and click the Open button
- Click on the Start button to begin creating your bootable USB drive
- If an update menu.c warning window appears click the Yes button
- At the data warning window click the OK button
- Once the task is complete click the Close button
- At the File Explore window click on This PC
- In the System Tray click on Safely Remove Hardware and select your USB drive to eject it
Using MacOS Sierra (10.12.x)
Prerequisites
- A bootable ISO image
- A USB 3.0 thumb drive large enough to accommodate the ISO or larger and can be erased
- UNetbootin, which facilitates the creation of bootable USB drives and can be found at:
http://unetbootin.github.io
Solution
- Go to the Finder so you can properly view your desktop
- Plug in your USB drive to an available port
- In the Finder double-click on the icon of your USB drive and backup any data you don’t want lost
- From the File menu select New Finder Window
- Selecting your hard drive, navigate to Applications > Utilities and double-click on Disk Utility
- When Disk Utility opens, on left-hand window pane you will find the Device list
- Under the External heading select your USB device and not the Volume which follows
- In the toolbar click on the Erase button
- In the Scheme pull-down menu select Master Boot Record
- In the Format pull-down menu select MS-DOS (FAT)
- In the Name field type an eleven character alpha/numeric name (no special characters) and click the Erase button (If a failure is encountered start at step 8 and try again)
- From the Disk Utility window select Quit Disk Utility
- In the Finder window navigate to your UNetbootin app and double-click it to open
- Verify that Type: USB Drive is selected
- Verify that Drive: is properly pointed to your USB drive (usually listed as /dev/disk2s1 unless you have multiple drives)
- Click on the radio button next to Diskimage
- Verify that ISO is selected from the pull-down menu
- Click on the “…” button, navigate to your ISO image, select it and click the Open button
- Click on the OK button to begin restoring the image to your USB drive
- When the Warning dialogue pops-up click on the Yes to All button
- Click on the Exit button
- From the Finder desktop eject the newly created USB boot drive by dragging it to the trash