November 15, 2024

Create a Bootable USB Stick (Flash Drive) for Ubuntu Linux Installation

In this tutorial, we explain how to create a Ubuntu Linux USB bootable flash drive or USB stick.

Here is the main motivation for creating this tutorial. In order to install a Linux Ubuntu version on a computer, we need to create a bootable USB stick (flash drive). By creating a bootable Linux Ubuntu USB stick we can directly start the Ubuntu installer once the computer is started. We can either install Ubuntu or we can use Ubuntu from the USB stick. That is, by creating the bootable USB stick, we can directly run the Linux Ubuntu from the USB stick without permanently installing it on our computer.

The YouTube tutorial accompanying this webpage tutorial is given below.

How to Create an Ubuntu Bootable Flash Drive

The first step is to go to the Ubuntu download page

https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

and by selecting the download button, we download the ISO file:

ubuntu-22.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso

In your case, the name of the file might be different. The download screen is given below.

After downloading the file, we need to install another program that will enable us to write the downloaded ISO file to the USB flash drive in order to create a bootable USB flash drive. Note that we cannot simply copy the downloaded ISO file to the USB flash drive. Instead, we need a special program to create a bootable USB flash drive. The name of the software is balenaEtcher. This software runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. We can download balenaEtcher from this link:

https://etcher.balena.io/

Click on Download Etcher and find the appropriate program version matching your operating system. In our case, we have a Windows operating system. Download the file and run the downloaded file to install the program.

Then, open the Balena etcher.  Select the downloaded Ubuntu ISO file, and select the target as the destination USB flash drive, and finally click on Flash.

This will create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive.