Creating bootable USB disks from ISO images

Booting from a USB disk is the most common way of provisioning bonders and bare-metal aggregators. The instructions below explain how to make a bootable USB disk on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Etcher

A free, open-source option for creating bootable USB disks on Windows, MacOS and Linux is balenaEtcher: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Linux CLI

To write a USB disk on Linux, use the dd command included in your distribution.

Plug in your USB disk. Then use either your distribution’s method of showing the filename given to the disk, or use dmesg to show the filename:

root@host:~# dmesg
...
[ 1548.784522] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci_hcd
[ 1548.923255] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0930, idProduct=6545
[ 1548.923270] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 1548.923279] usb 1-1: Product: DataTraveler 2.0
[ 1548.923287] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Kingston
[ 1548.923293] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 1C6F654E5975EDA1E94B0517
[ 1548.925296] scsi7 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0
[ 1550.008610] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 PMAP PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[ 1550.013255] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[ 1551.347689] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] 15240576 512-byte logical blocks: (7.80 GB/7.26 GiB)
[ 1551.348724] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 1551.348741] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[ 1551.350283] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[ 1551.350315] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1551.355687] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[ 1551.355717] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1551.377985]  sdb: sdb1
[ 1551.381814] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[ 1551.381842] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 1551.381860] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

The “sdb: sdb1” in the above listing show that the disk has been given the filename /dev/sdb.

Then use dd to write the image to the USB device:

dd if=debian-bonding-amd64_custom.iso of=/dev/sdb

Finally, ensure all the data is written to disk completely:

sync