In this article, we are going to make a bootable USB drive with Rufus – a free and open source application – from a Windows machine.
Rufus is a free and open source application to create bootable USBs. It’s one of the easiest and best way to do that. We, Linux users, have this habit of trying new distributions very often, and usually a VirtualBox solves that purpose but the problem comes when you are in a dilemma of switching your primary Linux distribution.
A VirtualBox is a very handy tool but before installing a Linux distribution on the machine, it’s better to test it first on bare metal. A USB stick allows you to boot into a live session for that purpose. It’s also handy when you have decided which distro you wanna go with, because you would need a bootable USB with that distribution on it to install it on your system.
In both the cases – trying it out, or installing it – you need a bootable drive. You can easily make a bootable USB with Rufus irrespective of the distribution you prefer.
Most of the Linux users are distro hoppers, who loves jumping from one Linux flavor to another. Some of them just set up a VirtualBox to try a different distributions, others prefer to create a bootable Linux USB. The advantage of a bootable USB is that the experience is on bare metal and is closest to what you feel and experience when you decide to replace your current operating system. If you are a Windows user and reluctant to switch, creating a bootable Linux and playing with it upfront will give you that confidence to dual boot or replace Windows completely. On top of that, the performance is much better when compared to running it in a virtual box.
In this article, we will go through the steps to make bootable USB with Rufus. There are other ways as well, but we will discuss that in a different article.
You can download Rufus from below link. You can download the app and install it or get a portable copy. I prefer the portable one, it does the same thing without the need to install it.
You would also need a ISO image for the distribution you want to install. If you are not sure, try with the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS version.
https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you?version=24.04.1&architecture=amd64<s=true
Right, so fire up the Rufus application and you will see this screen. It auto-detects a USB drive and as you can see, I have a 16 GB pen drive plugged in.
Under Boot selection option, you need to select the Ubuntu ISO which you just downloaded. Click on Select and navigate to the download. If you are just going to use this USB to install Ubuntu and not for any further future use, leave the Persistence partition size 0. It basically stores data from your live session.
Leave every other options as is. Make sure to back up your USB drive or remove any important data from there, as this step will format that USB drive.
When you start the process, it will ask you for a confirmation about the mode you want to use to burn the ISO. You can either write it in the ISO image mode which is recommended, or write in DD image mode. DD mode is similar to dd command in linux, which copies the image byte by byte. Go for the default setting.
It will take some time to finish. As you can see, to make a bootable USB with Rufus is super easy, you don’t need the command line, there’s not many options (and confusions) and it’s done within minutes.
You can now use this USB drive to either test a Linux distribution or install one from it.
Hope this helps, cheers.
