A bootable USB works great, it can be very helpful at times. And it is now so easy to create a bootable USB drive with a Linux Distro of your choice. The bootable USB stick works like the Live CD but with the advantage of persistence. Persistence means you can load programs on the USB drive, unlike the Live DVD. Plus settings are remembered. It also means that you can load tools on it to help rescue a broken computer, Windows or Linux. I have rescued many a PC (Windows) by booting using Linux and copying files off and rescuing them. Or you can replace bad files directly. It is like carrying  a “computer” that you can keep in your pocket and plug into a PC and have it boot right into an environment you have set up for your self. Just be aware that certain PC’s that run Windows 8 try to block the ability to boot off of external devices. You have to go into the BIOS and switch off or over ride this behavior of the so called boot protection. It usually requires one to enter a 4 digit code when you leave the BIOS. Some PC’s flash this briefly, too fast to see in my opinion.

I installed Linux Mint XFCE 32bit on a USB drive recently. XFCE mostly for the fact that XFCE is light and will run on just about any PC, 32 bit will run on both 32 and 64 bit machines. Mint because I haven’t tried it yet and a bootable USB drive would make a good test drive, especially since I can do a lot more than I can with just the Live CD. The USB drive I bought for this was off of eBay, I opted for a USB 3.0 device for the speed when a machine has USB 3.0.

Linux command line using dd

Linux as well using dd to copy from the iso to the usb drive, make sure you know where the drive is mounted when doing this via the command line. Use sudo fdisk -l to list all of your mount points. Alternatively you can use  lsblk and you will see mounted and unmounted devices.

See the sdb1 below all of the info about sda1 ( hard drive )….

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
 /dev/sda1   *           1        3648    29296875    7  HPFS/NTFS
 /dev/sda2            3648        9729    48850529+   5  Extended
 /dev/sda5            9668        9729      497983+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
 /dev/sda6            3648        9667    48352256   83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 16.1 GB, 16079781888 bytes
 256 heads, 9 sectors/track, 13631 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 2304 * 512 = 1179648 bytes
 Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
 I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
 Disk identifier: 0xc3072e18

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
 /dev/sdb1   *           8       13631    15694808    7  HPFS/NTFS

To burn ISO to sdb1 for example…

sudo dd if=~/Desktop/linuxmint.iso of=/dev/sdb1 oflag=direct bs=1048576

oflag=direct may not always work, leave it out if the copy fails. For more on doing this from Linux see the link below.

Mounting USB Drive from the Linux Command Line

First use fdisk -l or lsblk to find the location of the drive. Then for example to mount a usb drive at /dev/sdc1 to /mnt/sdc1 use…

 sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1

You can choose a mountpoint other than mnt, Linux can mount a drive to just about any folder you create. That is the beauty of it over lettered drives like Windows uses.

Universal USB Installer

The Universal USB Installer allows you to do all of this from Windows,

How to create a bootable Linux Mint USB drive using Windows…
http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2014/05/how-to-create-bootable-linux-mint-usb.html

 Test Drive

I have tried the drive on a fast machine with USB 3.0. Dell quad core 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM. It does boot fast, not as fast as a hard drive but very reasonable. I was able to stream video and watch TV with it, play DVD’s and adjust the screen saver NOT to come on.